No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny

by Clinton Heylin

  At the end of 1964, with a hundred thousand dollar insurance settlement available to him on his majority, he abandoned his job at the local evening newspaper, and did indeed “catch a boat to England.” With a few weeks to kill, and a guitar to hand – so the legend goes – Frank began his songwriting career onboard, disembarking with his signature-tune already penned. As Bert Jansch later observed, “’Blues Run The Game’ influenced just about everybody who heard it.” Even Simon himself would record the song for the third Simon & Garfunkel album, though not before ‘producing’ Frank’s own rendering, title-track of the one and only Jackson Frank album.

  Though Frank had none of Simon’s desire to ‘succeed’, which perhaps more than anything explains why they could remain such strong friends, the months in London seemed to push Frank out of himself and into his songs. Soon enough, he had ten songs all his own. Legend again has it that, at this point, Paul Simon “offered to produce Jackson’s first album with his own money.” In fact, since Simon was decidedly poor and Frank was rather rich, it was surely Frank who financed the single day of studio-time it took to record his entire repertoire.

  In attendance at the session for that eponymous debut (renamed Blues Run The Game for its CD reissue in 1996) were ‘tea-boy’ Art Garfunkel, ‘producer’ Paul Simon, Al Stewart (whose solitary contribution was second guitar on ‘Yellow Walls’), Frank’s landlady Judith Pieppe and, according to Pieppe, a shy girl called Sandy Denny. Frank was of a chronically nervous disposition and the intimidating pressures of cutting an album in a single day had induced such a state that, in Al Stewart’s words, “Jackson had to have screens put all around him, because he couldn’t play if we could see him.” However, even with these surround-a-screens, and a steady supply of tea and sandwiches from Art, it seemingly took Sandy to realise something more medicinal was required.

  Judith Pieppe: Jackson got very uptight. Paul was there, and Jackson was too uptight to do anything, and Sandy went to get him something to drink, [thinking about Jackson’s lines], “Send out for whisky, babe, send out for gin.” She thought right. [The] whisky relaxed him enough that he was able to sing properly.

  Jackson Frank, despite a couple of obligatory, Dylanesque rallying calls to Change, still comes across as an extraordinarily mature debut – a number of times extending beyond anything Simon had recorded himself. Aside from the plaintive songs of loss – ‘Blues Run The Game’, ‘Milk and Honey’ and ‘You Never Wanted Me’ – that Sandy later made her own, the writing on songs like ‘My Name Is Carnival’ and ‘Dialogue’ gave lessons in songwriting to all those British contemporaries with ears to hear. Frank’s guitar-playing also had an assurance that belied his twenty-two years. To an eighteen-year-old nurse he must have seemed a walking, talking, shooting star. Certainly Frank remembered a slightly awed Sandy.

  Jackson Frank: When I first met Sandy Denny she was a little insecure, and somewhat shy. We were both hanging out at a club in London called Bunjies … Sandy was working as a nurse and she was just starting out on the folk scene. She was learning the ropes about performing in front of an audience and she was building up her songs. She slowly built up confidence, and expanded her material. She [also] became my girlfriend.

  Nobody seems too sure when (or why) Sandy and Jackson became an item. Heather Wood’s slightly romanticised version of events has it that Sandy and Jackson were over at Judith Pieppe’s flat, “I guess they’d gone over to hang out and it was late,” when Pieppe asked the pair, “Do you want to stay? … and she thought they were a couple, so she gave them a double-bed.” The version lodged in Frank’s deconstructed psyche had it that Sandy confessed to him one evening that an older man wanted to set her up in an apartment, presumably as his mistress, and as a means of talking her out of accepting the sordid proposal Jackson suggested that she become his “old lady”.

  Frank also insisted, in an interview he gave shortly before his death in March 1999, that he “got her to quit the nursing profession and stick to music full time.” As we know, though, Sandy was already committed to beginning college, enrolling at Kingston Art College in September 1965. Despite having commited herself to a year or more of study, though, Sandy’s primary focus remained music. A fellow student in her class, David Laskey, recalls a “Sandy [that] wasn’t really socially involved in the school. She seemed to have a lot of friends outside the school.” He also remembers how she would, on occasions, give recitals to her fellow students.

  David Laskey: There was a lecture room over the main entrance, where we had History of Art lectures, and she gave us some recitals there. They were during lecture time. We used to do a period of Complimentary Studies each week as part of the lectures and people would do anything – poetry – readings … one chap even did a demonstration of bull-fighting passes … [Sandy] played guitar and sang, and [already] had a wonderful voice. No-one played [along] with her. [CD]

  Her course was set, and it was to extra-curricular musical lessons that she continued to devote most of her attention. John Renbourn recalls a Sandy that, by this stage, “not only was … singing well – because she had a lovely voice to start with – [but] was playing very nice guitar, finger-picking, rather in the style of … Jackson C. Frank. From him she probably learned even more finger-picking, and her repertoire [began to] include not just the folk songs from the club.”

  On October 27, 1965, Sandy shared her first bill with Jackson Frank (and Paul Simon) at the opening of a new folk club at 22 D’Arblay Street, also in Soho. Leduce chose to bill itself as “London’s only contemporary folk club,” which gave away its intended niche. However, she continued to doubt her own playing skills. With the examples of Frank, Renbourn and Jansch, all regulars at the Cousins, to remind her how much she still had to learn, signs of low self-esteem began to invade her private thoughts, evidenced in a self-deprecating rhyme in one of her early notebooks:

  May I say?

  That you may!

  That you play

  Appallingly!?

  Did you know?

  I did so!

  That you grow

  Inflated-O.

  As late as January 1967, having warranted an interview in Melody Maker, Sandy was still asserting, “I mean to acquire technical competence, as well as quality and judgement,” as if her work to date wholly lacked such virtues. Part of the problem was that, however good a musician and mentor Frank was, he did very little for Sandy’s confidence. As Pieppe notes, “I don’t think, with Jackson, she had a chance of growing up. They were too different. [And] Sandy was very young.”

  It would appear that Frank took very little account of the age and experience difference. He was probably too wrapped up in his own pain to see beneath Sandy’s bluster, to the deep insecurities within. Linda Peters recalls Frank as “an absolute nutcase, and fairly abusive – to everybody, not just to Sandy,” while Ralph McTell remembers him as “a strange and brooding character.” One particular incident, early on in their relationship, indicates how Frank could cut away at Sandy’s self-esteem; and hence how inevitable it was that she would transcend this second father-figure in her life, just as soon as she felt she’d learnt enough to begin defining her own rebel yell.

  Al Stewart: It was at Judith Pieppe’s place in Dellar Street, where I was living … One day I met Sandy, who was a night nurse somewhere. She came around straight from duty. I remember [asking], “Who are you?” “I’m Jackson’s girlfriend.” … The first thing I ever heard her play was ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’. I didn’t know she could sing or play … It transpired that Jackson wasn’t that keen on his girlfriend playing the guitar. He basically thought that was his job … She had this great voice right from the start, although she was a little bit introverted about it all. She was only nineteen … I would see Sandy and I would see Jackson, and occasionally I would see them together, but it seemed like they were a separate thing even at that early stage, ‘cause he had another couple of girlfriends.

  Frank’s casual polygamy, as Heather Woo
d has suggested, was the norm on the folk scene, and Sandy herself seems to have been no stranger to the practise. However, Jackson seems to have been the first of her boyfriends to get under her skin. When she came to add ‘You Never Wanted Me’ to her own repertoire, the heartrending way she sang it transcended everything else in her repertoire, turning its sentiments back upon their author. The example Frank’s songwriting set undoubtedly had a profound effect on Sandy and, though they would see little of each other after he returned to the U.S. in the summer of ‘66, she would tell an interviewer in 1972, “I really loved the way [Frank] wrote, and he has probably had more effect on me than anyone. I can still hear his influences in my songwriting now.” As she rhetorically asked in 1971’s ‘Next Time Around’, “Who [first] wrote me a dialogue set to a tune?”

  Ironically, just as his example was inspiring Sandy (and a number of other Cousins regulars) to pick up their pens and guitars, Frank found himself stonewalled by writer’s block. Though he would eventually record a handful of songs in the early seventies, Frank’s mental problems were such that even coalescing his fragmenting visions into three verses and a chorus soon proved beyond his powers. By the time Sandy came to record her own versions of Jackson’s songs, he would be back in the U.S. for good. Though Frank remembered “Sandy trying out her new songs for me,” it required both the example he set and the experience of him leaving to prompt her to give her own muse rein.

  By which point she had given up college for good, with few in her year at Kingston having made any lasting impression. However, Sandy had established one lifelong friendship during the sculpture classes, albeit not a fellow student. The lady with whom she became fast friends was often her given subject, an American lady nearly ten years her senior named Gina Glazer, who modelled for the school. Glazer had moved to England in 1958 to make a go of folksinging in the clubs of London, after growing up in a household that had often served as a crashpad for the legends of American Folk Music.

  Gina Glazer: My father was a writer for People’s Songs, so I grew up knowing Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston actually sleeping on the floor … [In 1958] there was work waiting for all of us [in London] because it was skiffle, Jack Elliott was there, Derroll Adams … there was a lot of work for the American folksingers then … I got married there, and I had two kids. And as a day job I was a model at Kingston Art School, where I met John [Renbourn] and Sandy and Eric Clapton, who used to babysit my kids … I worked in different classes for these preliminary year students. I got to know Sandy better because she was in sculpture, and it’s a more intimate setting, and that’s when we became really close. John, I just met socially more. And then we started having a folk club. But I met them within the same few months. Even with our age difference, we hit it right off. She was hysterical, wonderful sense of humour. She enjoyed [Art], she was very good at it, [but] she already was leaning much more towards music.

  Glazer insists that when she first befriended the young Sandy she never knew she sang folksongs. The subject only came up during one of Gina’s ubiquitous parties. The same shy, self-conscious Sandy who had sung to Al Stewart only when Jackson was away seems to have elected to leave Gina equally in the dark.

  Gina Glazer: We were friends for months. I just thought she was fun, and she’d confide in me … She’d come to my house after work but it wasn’t until later, at a party at my house, that she picked up a guitar and started singing. I nearly fainted. I had no idea. Right after Joan Baez, there were a lot of young women picking up a guitar, sort of plucking away and singing, and they weren’t very good. [But] Sandy had a beautiful voice.

  Though Gina played ‘the circuit’ at this time, she was deemed authentic folk, playing the Singers and other ‘traditional’ outlets, and it is perfectly possible that she and Sandy successfully bypassed each other’s public performances through 1964 and most of 1965. And yet, Sandy must have known that Gina was a folksinger in her own right, if not from clues in her record collection, then from their mutual friend, John Renbourn.

  Renbourn seems quite certain that Sandy attended a number of the song-swapping sessions at Gina’s house, near to the college, where “guys like myself used to go and sit around in her garden, listening to her singing and playing.” Indeed he is quite convinced that “Sandy learned an awful lot from Gina, and even later it was hard not to notice how similar she sounded in her vocal texture and phrasing. Gina actually taught her a lot of her early repertoire … [Gina] knew Odetta, Dave Van Ronk and Paul Clayton. She had sung a fair amount in the States … she had a lovely, fragile voice and played old-style finger-picking guitar and banjo.” Even if Sandy shared Renbourn’s assessment, Gina herself denies the debt, though she owns up to playing some part in Sandy’s transition from Baez clone into traditional singer.

  Gina Glazer: There was a similarity in voice quality [but] she had it the first time I heard her sing. I know a lot of her choice of songs [came from me]. Because I used to tell her where to look for good ballads…. John [Renbourn] and Sandy and I would spend time together. We’d sometimes go up to London and go to the Cecil Sharp House to look up songs, and John lived very near so he’d drop in. I don’t think she was too thrilled at the research, but it was something to do … She didn’t get as excited as I did when I’d [find] a version and say isn’t this incredible, this was sung in 1500 in the north of England and this was sung in 19something in Virginia, and she couldn’t understand how I’d get so excited about that oral tradition [thing].

  The wondrous workings of the creative folk tradition may have continued to bemuse Sandy but, with Gina encouraging her to peak beneath its top soil, she began to apply her keen mind to finding traditional material that she could connect with, and that suited her remarkable vocal range. When Peter Kennedy wrote to her in September 1966, asking her to attend a recording session for his Folk Song Cellar radio series, he asked her for a list of songs she might wish to sing. The four suggestions that came back were all good Celtic folksongs, ‘I Once Loved A Lass’ (which Sandy later recorded as ‘The False Bride’), ‘Jute Mill Song’ (made popular by Ewan MacColl), ‘She Moved Through The Fair’ and the ballad of ‘Geordie’. When it came time to record the session, she preferred two other examples of British tradition, ‘Fhir A Bhata’ and ‘Green Grow The Laurels’.

  Earlier that summer, Sandy had also met Bert Lloyd, then in the final stages of writing his masterful textbook, Folk Song In England, and had asked him for the lyrics to ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’. Lloyd, in replying, wrote that he had been “thinking about other songs, but I need to hear you a bit more before I know for sure what suits you.” He would later send Sandy lyrics for ‘Sovay’ or ‘The Female Highwayman’, which he suggested was “best [sung] unaccompanied, or at least not guitar-accompanied, so that the rhythm can really ripple.”

  Sandy seemed to hit a rich vein of inspiration in the months after Frank’s departure, possibly inspired as much by Gina’s presence as Jackson’s absence. According to the man who had known the part-time couple best, the change in Sandy was profound. No longer was she content to sit in the shadows.

  Al Stewart: It seems as though she was there, as this ghostly figure, and then after Jackson went back to America, it was almost like somebody had put their foot on the accelerator, and all of a sudden she was everywhere. And she was a lot better. I think Sandy found another gear in the gearbox after Jackson went back to the States … She became a lot more confident.

  Crucially, Sandy had made the momentous decision that college was not where it was at – quite possibly a decision Frank did influence. In the version she told her father, the college “had a little talk with her and they said, ‘Well, Sandy, you seem to be doing well at this musical thing, what are you going to do? … if you want to try the music and see how you get on and if you decide it’s no good, we’ll always take you back.’” In all likelihood, Sandy simply made it clear that she was not taking up a place on the diploma course, preferring to follow other Kingstonians into the po
tentially lucrative business of making music. Reflecting her new found confidence, she soon acquired Sandy Glennon as her booking agent and manager, after spurning the business advances of the curmugeonedly Bruce Dunnett. She also began a weekly residence of her own, in the heart of Soho, at Leduce, where she felt assured enough to debut a couple of her own songs.

  The singer-songwriter genre seems, with hindsight, like one of the more obvious consequences of the folk revival, but at the time few folkies were taking traditional templates, à la Dylan, and moulding them anew. Yet Linda Peters remembers when Sandy told her that she was going to write some songs, down the Troubadour one night, and her startled reply was, “What do you mean, write songs?” Just as a twenty-year-old Dylan, on dropping out of his state university in the spring of 1960, would often claim one of his own efforts was actually an old folk song, so on the London folk scene of the mid-Sixties it was, in Trevor Lucas’s words, “far cooler … to say you’d ‘found’ a song from a traditional source, than to actually write something. History lent virtually anything some kind of credibility. And Sandy, from the time she’d worked the clubs … always copped a lot of flak for writing her own songs, not singing traditional things.”

  Just like the young Dylan, Sandy usually preferred to play covers when she was performing – even after she began to write her own songs (ditto Dylan, who was performing ‘No More Auction Block’ six months after he set ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ to its tune). Unlike Dylan, though, Sandy never seems to have set her lyrics to arrangements of traditional melodies, a process Dylan did not transcend until his fourth album. Even her first documented song, known either as ‘In Memory’ or ‘The Tender Years’, had its own elegaic tune to go with its bittersweet words, even if it very consciously borrowed the idea of lost youth (and lifted the final line of verse three verbatim) from ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’: