White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  I think it goes back to 1066. ‘Received pronunciation’ derives from Norman French, the language of court until the fifteenth century, while regional accents are the vestiges of pre-Conquest Celtic and Anglo-Saxon tongues. The great Norman cathedrals were shunned by the natives until the authorities tore down their simple stone chapels and forced them into York Minster and the others at sword-point. England, at some visceral level, remains a colonial society, with the inheritors of Norman power lording it over their uncouth subjects. The upwardly mobile take on ‘Norman’ characteristics while the lower orders are taught to be ashamed of their roots. If the conquered tribes had been ‘coloured’, this pattern would be easier to perceive. In Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Sweden – and even in France – rich and poor speak with roughly the same accent and eat the same sort of food. But not in England.

  Then there is the dominance of African rhythms. From the turn-of-the-century cakewalk and tango crazes to contemporary enthusiasms for everything from house to salsa, the social dances of modern Europe all come from Africa via the Americas. English folk music may often be bawdy, but it lacks the African-influenced rhythms contemporary culture associates with sexuality. Ironically, the term ‘morris dance’ probably comes from ‘Moorish dance’: sailors from English slaving ships showing the folks back home how Africans danced.

  I was led farther into the mysteries of English folk music by Roy Guest, the man coordinating the Blues and Gospel Caravan for its British promoters. Roy was a plump, jocular man with wounded, sad eyes. His father had been a director of Guest, Keen and Nettelfold before it was nationalized and incorporated into British Steel. As a young man building a railway in Turkey, Roy’s father had horrified his family by marrying an Anatolian Greek woman. He came to regret this union and, after a divorce, tried to pretend it had never produced a son.

  In the early sixties Roy opened the legendary Howff in Edinburgh, a key venue in the early Festival ‘fringe’. He married Jill Doyle (sister of musician Davey Graham) but they soon arrived at an open arrangement. Her paramour, the Scottish folk singer Archie Fisher (now a presenter for BBC Scotland), came back to their third-floor flat on Bristow Place one night, found Jill’s bedroom door locked and a strange coat in the hallway, walked to the front window and jumped out. His fall was broken by her MG, conveniently parked outside with the top down and loaded with cushions. Archie only broke his arm, but the tabloids published photos of the squashed roadster amid lurid speculations about the ménage-à-combien? Roy’s father wrote requesting that he no longer use the family name.

  Roy moved to London and joined the Harold Davison Agency, where he developed a ‘folk and blues’ division. He and his mother – who wore black shawls and looked as if she had just stepped out of a village in Asia Minor – lived in adjacent flats near Cecil Sharp House, the centre of folk activities in London in the early sixties. In the spring of 1965, I returned to England to help Roy with a UK tour by the Reverend Gary Davis and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, filling the gap in my calendar and bank account until the Newport Festival preparations began in June. After Brixton Prison, I needed a place to stay, so Roy introduced me to Topic Records’ producer Bill Leader, who offered me his sofa.

  During my winter in New York, I had attended a few recording sessions with Paul Rothchild, keeping the track listings, running errands and absorbing as much as I possibly could. Bill now became my mentor, and it would be hard to imagine a teacher more different from Rothchild. Paul’s records today sound expertly made: rich, full and three-dimensional. The same claims cannot always be made for Bill’s, but the performances are natural and spontaneous and the sound stands up well. In his Camden Town flat or a musician’s home, he would set up his two-track Revox, place the microphones in the liveliest room, nail blankets over the windows and make the musicians comfortable. His obvious love of the music and concern for the artists was something I never forgot. The hundreds of LPs Bill produced, from the ’50s through the ’70s, provide the backbone of any CD collection of British traditional music.

  We set off for Tyneside one day in Bill’s Humber Super Snipe. I helped carry the equipment, kept track sheets and even snapped the cover photograph for an album by the Fisher Family, Scots living in Northumberland. Brother Archie being the one who had jumped from Roy Guest’s window, I was curious to hear his account. He shrugged and said, ‘I just had to get out of there and the window was closer than the door.’ The music was beautiful and the hospitality helped to prepare me for what I would encounter when I got to Scotland.

  Travellers of both sexes in the early sixties thought nothing of hitch-hiking. Bill dropped me on the North Road outside Newcastle and a car stopped almost immediately. On the map I spotted a side road cutting across the lowland hills between the two main highways to Edinburgh with a village called Yarrow halfway along. The red line sported a green shadow, indicating ‘scenic’, so at Galashiels I made a song-inspired detour. A Boston folk singer named Robert L. Jones (whom I would invite that autumn to take over my job with George Wein and who would still be organizing George’s festivals and tours thirty-five years later) used to sing ‘The Dewy Dens O’ Yarrow’, a cheerful ditty with an eventful storyline. A Laird’s daughter elopes; her three brothers give chase; her hero kills two of the brothers but is treacherously slain from behind by the third; she rides back to the castle and lays her lover’s body at her father’s feet; then she kills herself.

  I sat on a rock in the sunshine contentedly eating an apple until a small white van pulled up. It had a wonderful meaty smell; the driver was delivering school lunches in the valley. As we approached Yarrow, I asked whether he knew the song. ‘Och, aye,’ he said, and pointed to some ruins overlooking the town. ‘There’s the castle where the laird lived and yon hill over there’ – pointing to a beautiful sweep of upland beyond the town – ‘that’s where the killing took place. She rode back this way,’ and he pointed to a worn trail through the grass. ‘It happened in the eleventh century.’ I thought about all the fuss in Princeton when Warwick found a 185-year-old cannon ball from the Revolutionary War.

  On the outskirts of Edinburgh, I got out Bill’s scrap of paper with the phone number of singer Dolina MacLennan and her husband George Brown. Not only did they offer to put me up, they used my arrival as an excuse for a party. Moreover, they lived in Roy’s old flat so I could lean out of the window and gauge the drama of Archie’s leap. The party was going strong until ten minutes to ten, when the men all rose and headed for the door. ‘It’s closing time, Joe,’ one said. I asked why, with a table full of ales and stouts, we had to worry about Scotland’s licensing laws. ‘That doesnae matter, Joe, it’s closing time!’ We all trooped out, leaving the ladies to put a dent in the remaining bottles.

  The sign on the pub across the road reads The Forrest Bar, but it is universally known as Sandy Bell’s. While I was taking in this famous outpost for writers, musicians, politicians, artists and Scottish Nationalists, two of our party placed ritual orders for rounds of heavy. As I contemplated the pair of pint glasses in front of me, the man on my right, Hamish Henderson, enquired whether I was familiar with single malts. My ignorance was rewarded with doubles of Laphroaig and Talisker.

  Henderson was a remarkable man. The last Pictish speaker on the planet, he ran the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University and had travelled the Highlands collecting songs and stories and documenting the disappearing dialects and ways of life of the most remote glens and islands. I had made a small start on my beverage collection when the landlord slapped his heavy palm on the bar: ‘Drink up, drink up. Time, gentlemen, please!’

  After choking down the doubles and the pints, I could barely walk. Hamish and I fell behind on the way back to the flat and he helped me up the dark stairway. On the second landing, he pinned me against the wall, muttering, ‘Let’s have a kiss of ye, lad.’ I found a second wind of sobriety and scrambled up the stairs.

  After a circuit of the Highlands that ended at the Kelvin Museum, I was joined
by Warwick for a trip to the ’65 Padstow May Day celebrations in Cornwall. In this ancient ritual, two ‘hobby-horse’ teams circulate through the fishing village for twenty-four hours, playing and singing a fertility-rite song. The ‘horse’ dances and twirls and tries to catch girls under the skirts of his costume. Every house and pub in Padstow receives this pagan serenade. The melody worms its way into your brain and you become addicted, listening out for it when you stray out of range.

  The local economy may have been meagre, but the villagers had little use for tourists or publicity. Non-Cornish singers were grudgingly welcomed but a camera crew was dragged out of their hotel room and thrown – equipment and all – off the end of the dock. When the tide went out, a 16mm camera was revealed in the mud, waves lapping gently over it.

  May Day 1965 in Padstow represented a high-water mark for the English traditional folk revival. The town was full of great singers: the Watersons, Martin Carthy, Luke Kelly of the Dubliners, Cyril Tawney, Maddy Prior, Louis Killen and Annie Briggs all camped out on a hill above the town. Word spread of a private gig the following night in a tiny pub down the road. It would be guest-list only, and furious lobbying began to make sure one secured an invite. There was a real sense that day of glamour and exclusiveness among these mostly unaccompanied traditional singers. The session was memorable: all had wonderful voices, a store of great songs and a vivid feeling for the past of rural England.

  The Watersons and Annie Briggs were the superstars. The former were a real family: two sisters, a brother and a cousin with the rich blend that comes only from genetically matched vocal cords (Bee Gees, Carter Family, Everly Brothers, Crowded House, for example). With rough manners and strong Yorkshire accents, they effortlessly communicated authenticity, yet their harmonies drew as much from their own rich imaginations as from any deep-rooted Yorkshire tradition. Within a couple of years of their first appearances, they were the most popular turn on the folk club circuit. I was enthralled by Norma Waterson’s voice: it had the soulfulness of a gospel singer’s, yet was devoid of any Afro-American phrasing or texture. She wasn’t a conventional beauty, but I found her alluring.

  Annie Briggs looked a bit like Patti Smith, with the same slim build, dishevelled brown hair and stubborn stare. She hitch-hiked to gigs and would disappear for weeks at a time. Her ‘act’ consisted of ancient ballads sung starkly with no accompaniment. She and Bert Jansch represented the tortured-genius category in the British folk world, but Annie seemed uncontrived, while I was never sure about Bert. She had no stage patter and in company was shy to the point of invisibility. (Sandy Denny’s ‘The Pond And The Stream’ conveys an awed impression of Briggs.) Like Smith, she retired in her prime to raise a family, then reappeared in the ’90s, powers intact. But in contrast to Patti’s reverentially awaited comeback, when Annie returned there were few venues or audiences for an unaccompanied ballad singer.

  My brother and I spent a week after Padstow driving around the West Country. On one occasion we arrived at a medieval Welsh landmark called Tretower Court just as it was closing. The caretaker was so pleased to have foreign visitors that he gave us a private hour-long tour of the building. Aside from his explanation of the advantages of molten lead over boiling oil for scalding attackers either side of a battering ram (you can peel it off the bodies and reuse it), the most memorable moment was coming upon the huge door to the dining room. Gigantic oak beams were held together by three iron cross-bars. Two were beautifully smooth while the third was badly rusted. No need to guess which were forged in the twelfth century and which came from a modern foundry.

  Further inspired by a Watersons recording session in Bill’s kitchen, I set off for Hull, where the three siblings lived together in a crowded flat. I think Norma was more bemused than excited by my attentions, but I spent a happy week with her, surrounded by song. She had warned me of her ‘serious’ boyfriend but refused to reveal more than that he was a singer who travelled a lot. One night, just before closing at the group’s folk club in the Ring o’ Bells pub, a handsome and well-known singer walked in unannounced and I saw the blood drain from Norma’s face. I whispered to her to give me a front-door key and a fifteen-minute head start and I would be on the road before they got back. I got the most adoring look I had had all week.

  Half an hour later, I was standing beneath the orange motorway lighting with my thumb out hoping for a London-bound lorry. Finding a Yank by the roadside in darkest Yorkshire was entertaining enough, but as the night wore on and I climbed into my fourth truck, I started embellishing the tale in order to keep both the drivers and myself awake. Dawn found me on the A1 just north of London telling a gripped cockney that I had been chased out of Hull by a jealous boyfriend wielding a butcher’s knife. He was sufficiently impressed to treat me to breakfast in a café hidden in a cul-de-sac filled with bare-knuckle fighters and other East End hard men finishing off their night with a fry-up.

  Back at Bill’s, Bert Lloyd paid a call and we all went out for a curry. A. L. Lloyd was a short, round man, with immense eyebrows and a perpetual expression of delight and surprise. If a bio-pic had been made of his life, Ralph Richardson would have been perfect casting. He told us tales of collecting music in Albania, Bulgaria and the farther reaches of the Soviet Union. That lunch excited dreams of travelling the world to record music, undaunted by the fact that I hadn’t produced anything in English yet. Bert sang in a thin high tenor with a wide grin: sea shanties, ribald ditties, war songs and tragic love ballads. His whole being exuded a delight in the melodies and lyrics he had collected from farmers, tinkers and old ladies the length of Britain. Although he was considered joint founder of the British traditional folk movement along with Ewan MacColl, I had difficulty imagining the two as cohorts. MacColl always seemed terribly self-important and rigid; Bert had an ego, but never appeared to take himself too seriously. He was endlessly helpful to young singers and, in later years, when Fairport Convention began to amplify traditional music, he gave them valuable advice and support.

  I wasn’t keen on singer-songwriters in those days, but their ranks were growing. People spoke of a girl named Sandy Denny with a powerful voice. I heard her sing early on and wrote her off as too American-sounding, which, considering how I came to love and mourn Sandy and her music, shows how narrow minded I was in 1965.

  Equally parochial was my attitude towards the British school of guitar virtuosi. I thought the likes of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn were just emulating American noodlers such as John Fahey and Sandy Bull and unworthy of much attention. But the modernizing trail that led through Pentangle, Fairport Convention and Richard Thompson to Kate Rusby began with an elusive guitarist I never heard perform live, Davey Graham. Being in and out of rehab did not prevent Graham from revolutionizing English folk music with a series of albums that combined blues and hillbilly techniques, jazz chords and traditional melodies. Renbourn and Jansch, along with John Martyn, Donovan, Roy Harper and Robin Williamson, studied these records closely. And while I never entirely embraced the genre, I worked successfully with many of its adherents.

  My enthusiasm for traditional music, combined with these trips to the hinterlands, marked me down as an eccentric to many of my London friends, most of whom had never ventured north of Watford. In later years, when I would hand out copies of new releases on my Hannibal label, I would get effusive thanks for Cubanismo, Taj Mahal and Virginia Rodrigues CDs, and tight little smiles and nods for the Richard Thompson and Fairport Convention reissues or the Mercury Prize-nominated CD by Norma Waterson. In February 2000, Taj Mahal came to London to receive a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ from Folk on Two, BBC Radio’s lone outlet for traditional music. The folk-averse love Taj as a paragon of blues authenticity, but that night he was hitting my arm and making faces of astonished delight as the Copper Family from Sussex sang their unaccompanied harmonies. Taj recognized soulful music when he heard it. For the grand finale, when the Coppers were joined by the remaining Watersons, John Tams, Eliza Carthy, Kate Rusby an
d the rest of the English folk establishment, you couldn’t keep Taj in his seat. He quickly learned the chorus and his gruff baritone boomed out amid the English voices on ‘Thousands Or More’, a song traceable to seventeenth-century Hampshire. Afterwards, he and Bob Copper swapped record-collecting anecdotes: it came as no surprise that the rural Englishman had sent away for 78s by Sleepy John Estes, Big Bill Broonzy and Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the 1940s. It seemed perfectly reasonable to Taj, and his grin testified to the pleasure that evening’s music gave him. Perhaps it’s easier for foreigners.

  Chapter 11

  THE SUMMER OF 1965 didn’t see me much farther along in my ambitions to become a record producer, but working in Newport, Rhode Island, as production manager of the Jazz and Folk Festivals wasn’t so bad. We had offices in one of the robber-baron mansions that line Newport’s rocky sea coast and cruised around in immense Oldsmobile convertibles loaned by a local auto dealer. The cars smelled of fake leather, but the radios had powerful speakers and I flipped contentedly between R&B and the Top Forty while exploring short cuts to the festival site north of town. The opening of the Jamestown Bridge that year had begun Newport’s transformation from a hard-to-reach aristocratic resort into a crowded tourist centre. Soaring property values would eventually turn Festival Field into a tract of mock-clapboard housing.

  The airwaves may have been full of Byrds, Dylan and Sonny & Cher, but the Jazz Festival line-up spoke of a genre at its peak: Dizzy Gillespie, the Modern Jazz Quartet, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Frank Sinatra (with orchestra conducted by Quincy Jones), Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Mann, Dave Brubeck, Buddy Rich, Illinois Jacquet, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Carmen McRae, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Joe Williams, Stan Getz, Abdullah Ibrahim (then known as Dollar Brand), Lee Konitz, Wes Montgomery, Charlie Haden, Elvin Jones, Cecil Taylor, Carla Bley, Paul Bley, Memphis Slim, Bud Freeman, Muddy Waters and, bizarrely, in Thursday’s opening night show, Pete Seeger. There were seven concerts spread over the 4 July weekend with tickets at $3.50 to $6.