by Colin Harper
Unfortunately for the story, Bert’s first encounter with alcohol was much later – at Deacon Brodie’s pub, High Street, aged seventeen and a half. Archie was nevertheless a major formative influence on Bert’s playing and Bert has never shied from acknowledging it. Next to Len Partridge, Archie was the best guitarist in town. More specifically, he taught Bert the now commonplace, then revelatory clawhammer technique. These were the dark ages before instructional aids of any kind. You could barely get the records.
Many roads in the early days of the folk revival led back to Ewan MacColl, and so it was for Archie Fisher and his mastery of guitar. When Appalachian banjo/guitarist Ralph Rinzler accompanied MacColl at a show in Glasgow in 1958, it was the first time anyone in Scotland had even seen clawhammer technique: ‘I went out on the stair and got taught a few banjo licks,’ says Archie, who had developed a parallel interest in the banjo through Pete Seeger, ‘and also got taught the guitar technique. Thereafter in Edinburgh they called me “the Clawhammer Jesus” – no one else knew how to do it. The idea was to have a moving, walking bass against a picked melody on the top strings. It sounded like two guitars – the hardest thing to teach. I think Elizabeth Cotten invented it. She played the guitar upside down, left-handed, playing the melody with her thumb and the bass with her fingers – so we were basically playing her style upside down.’12
The only two people of roughly Bert’s age on the Scottish scene who were even close to making a living at music at that time were Archie Fisher, lean and smouldering, and a fellow of huge girth and jollity called Hamish Imlach whom he had met at secondary school in Glasgow. Archie gave Bert the rudiments of playing, while Hamish lived out the romance of the job: ‘He was probably the first real folksinger I ever saw,’ said Bert, ‘storming away on his guitar. And I used to sit six inches away, watching his every move!’13
Born in Calcutta in 1940, Hamish had a colourful background. His paternal grandmother and great-aunt had owned a silver mine in Bolivia at the turn of the century, discreetly employing for some years a couple of characters known to legend as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – they never did have that shoot-out at the end. His father Herbert had played guitar at ceilidhs – Scottish dances – in the 1930s where he had acquired the name ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe’, partly through playing guitar, partly through the family’s fund of Bolivian outlaw stories, and all doubtless bolstered by a preference for Brazilian cigarettes containing one hundred per cent marijuana – available quite legally in Britain up to 1934.
Hamish’s mother Margaret had a successful hairdressing business in Calcutta which allowed the family to lead a relatively lavish lifestyle. The Second World War was on and her husband, Herbert, having joined the RAF, was in Britain. Too late for the christening, a telegram from Herbert arrived advising Margaret to ‘call him anything but Hamish – all the Hamishes I know are drunken wasters’. Perhaps true, perhaps not, but precisely the sort of tale Hamish would delight in telling against himself throughout a folk singing career unashamedly based on funnies first and music second. As a toddler, he had been bounced on Mahatma Gandhi’s knee on a railway platform, as a child he had spent blissful weeks in the Himalayas recovering from TB, as a schoolboy he had gone through primary wearing a kilt (not, admittedly, through any preference of his own): rare beginnings for a fat boy who wound up in Glasgow in the fifties.
Hamish’s parents divorced during the war and Margaret took her children first to Australia, homeland of her second husband, and then, for medical reasons concerning Hamish’s younger brother, to Scotland. It was 1953. They had relatives in Glasgow: ‘As the train came in up through the South Side and then the Gorbals I looked out at these blackened sooty buildings,’ said Hamish, ‘and thought this was war damage. My uncle and his family were living in a big old building on the top of a hillock dignified by the name of Broomhill, in West Glasgow. In the grounds was a small courtyard with stables, and houses which had been for the grooms. It was about to be auctioned off for back taxes. My mother went to the auction and bought it for £750, the price of a modern bungalow at the time. The value was in the land, but the house was a liability, a money-swallower. My mother proceeded to pour thousands into fixing the roof, getting the rooms divided, painting and decorating, furnishing and carpeting, and fitted it out as a boarding house.’14
Hamish had been intended for public school but wound up at a local establishment, Hyndland Secondary, where his combination of Palm Beach shirt and fez and a certain admirable though wholly unrequited swagger with the ladies were distinguishing features. ‘It was in the playground that I first met Archie Fisher. I went up and asked if he would like to buy a lighter.’ By the summer of 1958, Margaret had fallen out with her relations and was in any case spending a lot of time going backwards and forwards to Australia. Hamish, having finished school, was left to his own devices with the rare luxury of a large house and regular income from the rent. A year or two earlier it had been damaged by fire: ‘Only half the building was salvaged in some sort of usable state, so rooms could be let out cheaply. I moved down to the little courtyard, to a flat in what had been part of the stables.’ Determined to avoid national service as a squaddie, he applied to Sandhurst Military Academy for officer training but then, halfway there by hitchhiking, took cold feet: ‘My mother wrote a letter saying my stepfather was dying in Australia and I had to be flown to his bedside. I got a nice letter back and was never called up.’ Freedom, and a place to enjoy it, were his. ‘I was the only one of our age to have a house, so the party was at my place. It lasted nineteen months.’
The ‘Broomhill Bums’, as they became known, were all keen on folk music and included Archie Fisher and his sister Ray, the eldest siblings of a large family that would later all make their mark on record; Bobby Campbell, a fiddler; and Ian ‘Josh’ MacRae, soon to become a recording artist of some local celebrity with ‘Talking Army Blues’ and ‘Messin’ About On The River’. During 1958 – 59 MacRae was appearing on Scottish TV’s Jigtime as one of the Reivers, Scotland’s answer to the Weavers.15 Like Lonnie Donegan, he had acquired his professional forename from a musical hero (Josh White) and had attended Glasgow School of Art alongside Jimmie Macgregor. They were the first two students to play guitar at what was soon to be a hotbed of musical activity. Through national service MacRae had got to know Jamie McEwan, elder brother of Rory and Alex, who had once squired Princess Alexandra and who would, in the early days of the Broomhill party, bring along 78s of blues people the others had never heard of. People interested in the blues had a habit of finding each other in those days.
Ailie Munro, in The Democratic Muse, her study of the folk revival in Scotland, concludes that there are no reliable estimates for the proliferation of skiffle in Scotland but an accumulation of anecdotal evidence suggests its impact was immense. Even Ewan MacColl was obliged to reflect, with just a hint of exasperation, that ‘oddly enough, the skiffle repertoire persisted in Scotland long after it had been abandoned elsewhere’.16 Certainly, for Hamish and Archie the start of their interest in music was down to the skiffle craze, while the very nature of Glasgow – a major port and population centre – provided the other elements of what one could view in retrospect as a textbook progression through to the blues and, beyond that, to folksong from America and consequently to new forms of accompanying and presenting the indigenous music of Scotland itself:
‘A lot of the kids played skiffle at school,’ said Hamish. ‘There were a lot of Dixieland jazz clubs around and we had very good record stores. I was buying blues records in 1955, before we ever saw any blues players. There were these six 78s on Vogue which had been done in Belgium by Broonzy, but there was very little else available. Then this guy called Cliff Stanton who had a record store started bringing them over from America, but they were very expensive and they’d take months – and he was ordering them and pirating them, using one copy to cut a metal master plate. It started with the well-known ones like Leadbelly, because of the skiffle connection, but then the
re was all kinds of things.’17
‘Most of us at that time,’ says Archie, ‘were very heavily influenced by banjo and guitar aficionados from America. We were buying things on spec by mail order, instrument-led rather than song-led or tradition-led.’18 For Archie, an unsuccessful attempt to buy the Jimmie Rodgers single ‘Kisses Sweeter Than Wine’ around December 1957 provided a revelation by default. The record was rising up the charts and the shop had sold out. The retailer pointed out a version of the song on an album by the Weavers, a group Archie had never heard of but, being flush with birthday money and not inclined to wait a few days for the release of yet another version by cabaret sensation Frankie Vaughan, he took a chance on it.
The Weavers, formed in 1949, are generally credited with kick-starting the folk revival in America, generating unprecedented sales – their recording of Leadbelly’s ‘Goodnight Irene’ alone sold a million copies in 1950 – which continued even during a period of McCarthy-ist blacklisting for Communist sympathies during the early fifties. For Archie, the Weavers were his introduction to Pete Seeger: group member, author of the song, half-brother of Peggy and something of a whiz on the banjo. The following year, seeing Ralph Rinzler in action would be a turning point. For a start, it was the first time any of them had seen a capo or a thumbpick let alone clawhammer technique. Archie would learn an easy blues called ‘Solid Gone’ that utilised the technique and Hamish would have a crack at ‘Railroad Bill’. For keen-eared youngsters in Scotland, as in London or anywhere else that played host to the visiting Americans, it was, in Archie’s words, a case of ‘guitar lessons by osmosis – you just watched and took it away with you’.
Hamish had gone along with the craze in trad jazz – buying the records, going to the dances – but his musical interests, right down to guitar playing, were in direct proportion to their social benefits. ‘I was a very slow learner,’ he recalled, ‘had no natural aptitude for it. My reason for trying to learn was because everyone else was and they were my pals. I wanted a party piece. I had my own house at eighteen so it was a place to go back to with a drink and play, ’cos there were no gigs then. You’d occasionally get playing to the unfortunate people in an old folks home – but what had they done to deserve us!’19 The next visiting performers to make a real impact on the progress of the Broomhill Bums were ‘Rambling’ Jack Elliot (an introduction to flat-picking) and then, most significantly, Brownie McGhee.
‘When the boat landed in Southampton I didn’t know what to expect,’ said Brownie many years later. ‘I’m getting off the boat and the bands was playin’, the music was ravin’ and the cameras were flashin’ and I was ducking my head saying, “Excuse me, sorry, what do you want?” And they said, “You.” “What do you want me for?” I thought I was in the way. They kept taking pictures of me. I said, “Nobody knows me here, who’d want pictures of me?” And when Chris Barber got to me he says, “Brownie, this is all for you.” I says, “What for?” He says, “They’re welcoming you here to the shore.” I went for Big Bill, to tell the truth about it, because Bill says, “I won’t be able to go any more, Brownie.” Bill didn’t tell me how they was going to react, he said, “They’ll love you.” That’s all. I’d never been out of the country, and I just couldn’t believe it could happen. I’d never been appreciated in America and nobody thought anything of the blues, which is American – the blues is America, America is the blues, and I am the blues – so I didn’t think I should go anywhere else till America was understanding it. But when I got there it was altogether a different thing in ’58.’20
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee visited Britain many times during the sixties. The first time they came it was April 1958 and, like Broonzy before them, they toured the country as guests of the Chris Barber Jazz Band. As if the culture shock wasn’t great enough, by the time they appeared in Glasgow the following year, for a concert at the McClellan Galleries with Barber’s band, they had to contend with a fat man living in a stable and hosting an endless party to which they were invited. Hamish produced his Philips tape recorder ‘which Brownie and Sonny were watching like hawks. I didn’t learn much but Archie did.’21
That summer, the party still raging, a touring production of The Merry Widow came to town. Among its personnel (and distinguished by the grand title of ‘Assistant Stage Manager with Small Parts’) was Martin Carthy. ‘The master carpenter at the theatre was a folkie,’ said Carthy, ‘and he kept talking about the Glasgow Folksong Club, so I went along with him on the one night I had off. He took me to Hamish’s place first. I met Ray and Archie Fisher and Hamish and Bobby Campbell there and then went to the club and met Josh MacRae, Norman Buchan, Gordon McCulloch …’ Carthy was an emissary from distant London with knowledge to impart. He had been taking guitar lessons from Peggy Seeger and called her technique ‘Peggy Seeger picking’. The Glasgow crowd had never heard of Peggy but any relation of Pete’s was a friend of theirs. Carthy and Fisher traded licks. Slowly but surely, and only rarely by direct influence, the Scots were catching up on London.
The Glasgow Folksong Club was founded in the summer of 1959 by a committee led by a future Member of Parliament, and spare-time member of the Reivers, called Norman Buchan. Situated centrally at the Trongate in a lunchtime eatery, the Corner House, it was the first Scottish folk club open to the general public. ‘The pleasantly pickled manager was quite tickled by the idea of an evening event,’ wrote committee member and Broomhill Bum Ewan McVicar. ‘He would charge a rent of £5 for the evening, and hope people would eat a lot of sandwiches. Drew and I reckoned that we could just about stump up the fiver between us if no one at all came on the night. They came in herds. I almost wept with relief.’22
‘Drew’ was Andrew Moyes, who would soon take over stewardship of the enterprise. It had been preceded, in spring 1958, by the establishment of a Folksong Society, under the wing of Hamish Henderson, at Edinburgh University. A Folksong Society at Glasgow University was established soon after. But the very earliest folk clubs in Scotland were those organised by enthusiastic teachers in two Glasgow schools. Morris Blythman’s club at Allen Glen’s Secondary for boys ran from 1953 to 1957. Robin Hall was among Blythman’s pupils at the time and the teacher’s home was a venue for visits by the likes of Lonnie Donegan, Peggy Seeger, Alan Lomax and elderly Scottish ‘source singers’. He brought Josh MacRae, then at Glasgow School of Art, to the school to give guitar lessons and encouraged his pupils to envisage the worldwide fraternity of the folksong. The second inspirational teacher was Norman Buchan at the mixed Rutherglen Acadamy. Using skiffle as an incentive, Buchan founded a popular Ballads Club at the school in 1958 and the same year organised a ‘Ballads & Blues’ evening in Glasgow in aid of political prisoners in South Africa. It featured, almost certainly, Ewan MacColl.
Although MacColl was less Scottish in upbringing than he would have liked, he had established a solid affinity with Scotland since his time with Theatre Workshop. While that company, from its inception in Kendal in 1946 through to the respite of Stratford in 1954, ‘lived on the brink of disaster … engaged in a war of attrition with a machine that wasn’t even aware of our existence,’ its tours to the working-class heartlands of Wales and Scotland drew increasingly large audiences. Uranium 235 was performed for the second time in Edinburgh in August 1951 at the first of Hamish Henderson’s ‘People’s Festivals’ – an alternative to the high-brow Edinburgh Festival proper and the antecedent of today’s Fringe. The following year MacColl’s anti-US imperialism play The Travellers was performed at the event and, in MacColl’s own analysis, proved so controversial that the Scottish TUC urged its membership unions to pull the plug on future funding. The People’s Festivals collapsed under a cloud of debt in 1955, but MacColl had established a reputation and an audience north of the border that could only be developed as the folk revival took shape.
In 1954, on the back of his Stratford benefit concerts, a London agency had offered MacColl and some of his associates a national tour, of which he identified Glasgow as t
he most successful part. They played to an audience of several hundred teenage school children. ‘From that gathering,’ he believed, ‘many of the early leading performers in the Scottish revival were later to emerge.’ The same could be said of the membership of Blythman’s and Buchan’s school clubs and of the Broomhill Bums. Aside from being born there Bert Jansch had never been to Glasgow until he was fifteen, and he can still remember the journey on the bus. These were not cosmopolitan times. But they were interesting times.
Around October 1960, shortly after Bert had wandered into the Howff for the first time, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee returned to Glasgow and took a taxi to Broomhill, in search of the fat man and his never-ending party. But the party, alas, had ended. Hamish had run out of luck: ‘I was attending lectures at Glasgow University – or supposed to be. In fact, I was watching cartoons at a film club called the Fred Quimby Appreciation Society, going to jazz clubs and drinking illegally. In the time-honoured fashion [my girlfriend] Wilma got pregnant and I married her. I was not quite twenty. Everything was going down the tubes. I was spending money as fast as I got it, running up bills everywhere. We were going to emigrate to Australia, and moved to Motherwell to stay with Wilma’s parents till the papers came through.’ Not finding Hamish, and discovering the house had been levelled in favour of high-rise flats, Brownie went back to the city centre, stopped someone in the street and quite remarkably scored Josh MacRae’s phone number. That night, the party was at his place. A day or two later the whole team were in Edinburgh where the duo had a concert at the Usher Hall, and afterwards a session at the Howff.