by Colin Harper
Later illustrious visitors to the club would include Pete Seeger, Memphis Slim, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and possibly even Muddy Waters, who first visited Britain in 1960 and whose uncompromising electric sound was too far ahead of a British audience just about educated to country blues. But for Bert Jansch the greatest and most enduring influence on his music, and on the course of his life, was Brownie McGhee. Many years later, not long before McGhee died, the film-maker Jan Leman brought Jansch to San Francisco to meet his hero one more time for the BBC documentary Acoustic Routes. His limp had got pretty bad, but as a raconteur and performer, McGhee was positively brimming with life, proud of his own history and willing to talk about it for as long as anyone cared to listen. In that sense, he was the very antithesis of his visitor. Bert, a man of precious few words at the best of times, was overwhelmed by the experience. Later on, gazing out over the bay, he had something to say:
‘If I’d never known music, if I’d never gone to the Howff,’ he declared, ‘I’d still be a gardener now I should think. Because I was so entrenched in gardening, from the age of five right up till I was fifteen, and it was a way of life. I figure I’m a very solitary person anyway. I think you have to be to be a musician on the road. You have to be aware of yourself and your own solitude, ’cos although you like the experience and the atmosphere of the club, as soon as it’s all over you want to be by yourself. But that may be a throwback from the gardening days, I don’t know. Ever since then he’s been an idol, he’s been revered by me, and to play with him has been an extraordinary sensation. I never, ever thought I’d ever play with him in my life – and I’m very proud to have been able to have done so.’23
According to Owen Hand, back at the Howff at the very dawn of the sixties Bert Jansch sat there in front of Brownie McGhee, inches from his fingers, all night. He watched him play ‘The Key To The Highway’ and then asked, ‘Could you play that again?’ And the next morning Bert was playing ‘The Key To The Highway’. It became a well-worn story of Hamish’s that Bert had also played something of his own that night for Brownie, who conferred his approval with a question. ‘How long you been playing?’ he enquired. ‘Six weeks,’ said Bert. There would be many stories in Hamish’s repertoire that were embroidered to the point of fiction. But that one was true.
Still employed as a nurseryman, the proud owner of a Big Bill Broonzy record and a first guitar in quick succession, Bert had been quick enough to realise his own limitations: ‘I couldn’t figure out how Broonzy played. I was fascinated with his technique.’24 Broonzy’s approach to everything, blues included, had been a happy marriage of pragmatism and diffidence: ‘You just make the chords E, A or B,’ he explained once, ‘and just rack your finger across all the strings and sing the blues, and change from E to A to B just when you feel like changing. Any time will do. You don’t have to be in no hurry. Just close your eyes.’25 As a stage performer Bert has been doing something at least superficially similar from day one. From the wealth of idiosyncrasy apparent in an amateur recording of Bert made in Glasgow two years later, he might have been given the advice straight from the master’s mouth. At best it had come first-hand from Brownie McGhee, who shared the same easy-going philosophy:
‘Me and Sonny were together from the beginning of time to the ending of Sonny’s life,’ he told his visitor and his visitor’s film-maker, ‘thirty-five years to be exact. A long time to be with a man! We never had a contract between us. We made money, we had ups and downs, twists and turns, joys and sorrows but we never had a rehearsal. Why rehearse and play something else? Music is to be played, not read, and our best performances were when we were rehearsing on the stage! Two wrongs make a right, providing you make the wrongs at the same time, and that was a policy I followed. If he played the wrong chord, I played the wrong chord. That’s got to be right. And we played that in life. Every mistake we made, we made ’em at the same time.’26
By the Edinburgh Festival of August 1960 the Howff had a regular clientele. There was Archie, of course, and Roy and Jill and a clutch of other musical talents who had been drawn out of hiding and into the sun: Len Partridge, the original guitar hero; Dolina MacLennan, a young Gaelic singer from the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides; Owen Hand, born in Ireland and raised in Edinburgh, already the veteran of adventure as a teenage runaway, coal miner, boxer, hot-dog seller, South Atlantic whaler and fairground barker. Len would teach Owen guitar from scratch, and take Bert on from where Jill’s knowledge had run out. For the new music and its acolytes, the Howff was a magnet. ‘It was an awful place really,’ says Dolina, ‘but when it was full of people and full of music and full of joy it was a wonderful place to be. All this music had been going on but there hadn’t been a focal point for it, and the Howff opening brought all those people together. There was nothing else like it at all.’
The previous year Dolina and her guitar accompanist Robin Gray had created a venue of their own, at the Waverley Bar in nearby St Mary’s Road, where they would sing every weekend. While not a folk club as such, as a centre for live music it would roll on into 1963 and outlive the brief blossoming of the Howff. ‘It was just a pub, but the first pub that had singing in Edinburgh,’ she says. ‘We sang there and gradually we would ask people to do a spot for us. I had to hide it terribly from my family because if they found out I was singing in a pub … This was forty years ago and women had only just started to be seen in pubs. We didn’t know that our traditional singing was “folk music” – everybody took it that folk music was what was happening in the Howff. But there had always been an acceptance of traditional music around Edinburgh. There were ceilidhs every Saturday night – for music, not songs – and of course the School of Scottish Studies had opened and the collections had started by then. Hamish Henderson and Calum MacLean were the first collectors. And the American collectors had started coming round and gathering from the travelling folk. When I came to Edinburgh, by sheer chance I met up with Hamish Henderson and Stewart MacGregor at a party and somebody said, “Sing”, and I sang a song and that was me, away – to this day!’
Stewart MacGregor was a doctor at a local hospital. On one occasion he stopped in the street to give first aid to a student nurse who had fallen off her scooter. The result of this encounter provides a fine example of the way word of mouth was the foundation of the new folk scene’s rapid rise. The nurse in question, Maggie Cruickshank, was from a similar background to Dolina – from the north of Scotland where traditional song was a part of family life. MacGregor invited her to his next social gathering, at an isolation cottage in the hospital grounds. Dolina and Robin were there too. It was a revelation: ‘Just in the middle of this party everything stopped and people started singing,’ says Maggie. ‘I was raving about this music and Stewart said, “Well, if you enjoyed that why don’t you go up to the Howff?”’ Bringing her little sister Liz along, Maggie did just that. She was immediately struck by Len Partridge’s guitar playing – quite unlike anything she had heard before. The Howff at this stage was operating only at weekends, and Maggie became a regular. It was not only the music that made the place compelling:
‘It was unbelievable,’ she says. ‘I’ve never seen so many characters in one place. There was a guy who was obviously into climbing and always seemed to arrive in his climbing gear, ropes and everything. Danced a lot. There was a young guy called “Wee George” who was like a gopher, went for everybody’s fags. He’d been from a dysfunctional family and that’s how he came to be at the Howff. All the odd bods in the world were there. Then there was Jim Haynes, a part-time stunt man who had a bookshop called The Paper Back just down the road where we’d all hang out as well. There was a guy called Highland Jim, an American with a big red beard who looked more like Rob Roy than Rob Roy, and had this Doberman Pincer called “Dog” that never sat on the floor – if it came into the Howff and wanted your seat, it got it. There was Mrs Mac, who used to make coffee and hamburgers, and an old guy called “Johnny the Basket Maker” who danced and made baskets and
babies’ rattles with beer tops inside them. People felt sorry for him so he would end up selling a lot of rattles! And then there was Bert’s Uncle Wattie who had this banjo which was never in tune. It didn’t stop him playing it.’27
The Howff was basically a coffee house, still open only at night as Maggie recalls: ‘It was quite an innocent time but still quite bohemian. I took my parents along the odd time, and an old great-uncle from Canada. I’d been into jazz before and that was a bit bohemian, but it was just as if this was something new that I’d been looking for. There was a kind of natural progression from jazz to blues and folk songs.’ Any time Chris Barber’s band came to town, Maggie was there. She had all his 78s, and still has Bill Broonzy’s autograph. Perhaps with her finals being in October 1960, Maggie missed out on Sonny & Brownie at the Howff, but her sister Liz was there and so too was this strangely quiet, unkempt fellow called Bert.
‘My sister was about eighteen when she met Bert, who was seventeen,’ says Maggie. ‘He was very introverted – seemed to shuffle everywhere, shoulders hunched, always wearing this white raincoat. Somebody said he was like an unmade bed. He really was. I don’t think he ever combed his hair. But he had this smile, and when he met Liz the next thing was they were sitting holding hands and seemed to just click. I can’t remember how long the relationship lasted, but they remained friends for many years. It was off and on and off and on. She seemed to be madly in love with him but I think she realised there probably wasn’t a future in it.’
Included on his first album some years later, Bert’s first song was about Liz. Known as ‘Courting Blues’ on the record, and in its primal state as ‘Green Are Your Eyes’, it was an atmospheric, sensuous composition – simple in structure, subtle in execution and a piece of work that does not sound like the compositional debut it is. It was a blues of a sort but owed, on the face of it, very little to the sound of his blues heroes. ‘I was knocked out when I wrote that and I used to go around singing it to everyone,’ said Bert.28 And as a result, he made a lasting impression on one passing stranger who would later become something of a soulmate.
Anne Briggs, perhaps the greatest English traditional singer of the revival, was a year younger than Bert, from a similarly complex family background, and would become increasingly similar in temperament as the sixties rolled on. Brought up by an aunt in Nottingham, Anne hitched up to Edinburgh with a school friend in the summer of 1960. They stopped at the house of a friend, Archie Fisher, and found themselves not alone in enjoying his hospitality: ‘Bert was staying there for the weekend at the same time,’ she says. ‘He had just given up his job as a gardener and he was playing this guitar music. He hadn’t been playing for very long but he was obviously a born guitarist. He was playing amazingly good music, very individual music. He had heard Archie Fisher and he had heard a lot of traditional blues, which had really influenced his playing. At that point he was playing an amalgam of that stuff plus he was starting to write one or two of his own songs. I think “Green Are Your Eyes” was in the process of getting together.’
Bert was still putting in time at the market garden when Maggie and Liz first met him, around August, but shortly after, drawn to the romantic notion of a life in music, he had packed it in. He did not, however, take an entirely direct route to the troubadour lifestyle: ‘When I met him he was a grocer,’ says Owen Hand. ‘I remember Bert and I sitting at two o’clock in the morning, on the steps behind the Sherriff’s Court, discussing the prospects of life as a grocer!’ Bert worked in a supermarket for less than a month, but if it was meant to placate his family it was a half-hearted and ultimately fruitless excercise.29 He left home and, becoming ‘caretaker-cum-dogsbody’, moved into the Howff. ‘I used to sleep on the benches,’ he says. ‘Woke up every morning to the bells of St Giles banging away.’ His mother was mortified. ‘I went to talk to him, to try and get him to come home again,’ says his sister Mary, ‘but that didn’t work. And although I bought records and everything I was still at a loss with the music people. I didn’t know how to fit in with them. To us, you lived simply: you went out to work and if you liked music you bought records or went to the dancing, in groups with your friends, and that was it. But Bert’s generation seemed to be completely different. There was a gap of over six years between us.’
‘I think it was just a teenage thing,’ says Maggie Cruickshank, ‘like dropping out of school and finding his own feet. But I think he was comfortable with us. He was like a brother. He often came to our house at that time, my mother knitted him a jumper, did his washing for him. Liz was at his sister Mary’s wedding [in 1962] but apart from Wattie I never met any of his family.’
Perhaps because of this close, family-like bond, Bert has come to think of Liz and Maggie as ‘more from my home life’ than fellow travellers in music. But within a year Maggie and Liz were both beginning to sing in public too, and as Maggie so pithily observes, ‘I don’t know what his home life was like – because he seemed to be around here a lot!’ He was also a regular visitor at Owen Hand’s flat in St Leonard’s Street: ‘I think it was just to play guitar,’ says Owen. ‘His own had been stolen, so he was usually around places where he could borrow one. He’d pick up the guitar first thing in the morning and he would play all day. You’d say, “Bert, there’s a meal on the table,” and you’d actually have to take the guitar off him to get him there. Come night-time we’d switch on the television and there was always this “kerchunk, kerchunk, kerchunk” going on in the background – “Bert, for God’s sake would you shut up!” But he was totally dedicated. He spent almost his entire day playing.’
Bert lived at the Howff for what he recalls as between three and six months. Roy Guest, introducing himself to the best of Mary Jansch’s memory as her brother’s new manager, came round to the family home in West Pilton ‘to reassure my mum that he was all right, that Bert was okay’. Bert himself would visit occasionally too but, although he loved his family dearly, making a clean break from their lifestyle and expectations for him was now paramount. He was good with his hands, and a self-sufficient individual. Whatever plans Roy Guest may have had for Bert’s musical advancement, these qualities would come in very useful to his plans for renovating the down-at-heel Howff. In the meantime, Bert was merely the resident curio in a place where life’s curios were abundant.
‘Bert was a nuisance,’ remembers Dolina with great affection, ‘he was under everybody’s feet. We used to try to clean the place up, get it ready for things and we made soup – soup was always going in the evenings when there was a function on. There was one wee toilet in the corner and this particular Sunday we were having a big night. Whoever was coming it was going to be a full house, and we were all getting the place together and the ballcock in the loo broke. There was no flush. You can imagine, sixty or seventy people and no toilet! So we gave Bert and Liz sixpence and a paper bag and sent them down to the Mocamba, a café on the High Street, to buy themselves a cup of tea and steal the ballcock!’
The day was saved and the evening, no doubt, a roaring success. What must be remembered, though, is that Bert, while very much a product of the Howff, almost never performed there. Only once, under the influence of drink, did he pluck up the courage to sing. But his guitar playing, at least, is remembered by all his contemporaries: ‘He was just so young,’ says Dolina, ‘watching what everybody else did for hours to learn, learn, learn. And he would sit for hours with a guitar going plink-a-plonk-plink-a-plonk to such an extent that you wanted to break it over his head! He was like a dog with a bone. He would not give up till he got a thing perfect and then he would just go on and on and on with the same thing – that’s my memory. But of course he’d just started playing.’
‘He came on at a rate of knots,’ says Maggie. ‘The first time I knew what a good guitar player sounded like was when I heard Len, just prior to meeting Bert. Bert didn’t have a guitar – he borrowed other people’s. But he took to it like a duck to water. Within a short time we all realised, “My God, th
is guy can play.” I’ve always felt that Archie has been a very underestimated player, but Bert was something else, like it was coming from inside him or something.’ The following year, still with no guitar of his own, Bert bought one for Liz: a nylon-strung Martin Coletti. ‘He taught her a few chords and was very encouraging,’ remembers Maggie. Somewhere in Edinburgh, later that year, Liz made her public singing debut.
‘Len Partridge would come to the club while I was living there,’ says Bert, ‘and he was a fantastic player. I used to go round to his house and take lessons.’ Aside from his technical ability, through Rory McEwan Len had access to all sorts of material otherwise unknown in Britain at the time and which, alongside the Broonzy and McGhee canon, would make up the bulk of Bert’s early repertoire. ‘I think I was possibly more influential on Bert than Archie initially,’ says Len, ‘but I don’t think so in the long term. No single person taught Bert how to play guitar – it was an amalgam. He came to me along with Harry Steele officially for lessons – officially in the sense that he paid for them. But at that time I would have said that Harry would have been the better guitarist. Harry was the diligent one. Bert was actually very slow, but then he suddenly took off exponentially. He was very withdrawn, but he was a laddie – five or six years younger than me.’
A tantalisingly brief amateur recording made at St Andrews University in 1963 confirms Len’s reputation.30 For unlike most of his Howff contemporaries, Len Partridge never pursued the big time. Owen Hand’s view is one typically held: ‘At the time of the Howff Len was possibly the most talented person there. But the other side of Len was his appearance. When he first came to the Howff he was over twenty stone in weight and only about five foot eight in height. He was so conscious of his weight that he seldom came out in the daytime and in the evenings travelled on an old Vincent motorcycle. He had a wild, long beard and long hair pulled back into a pigtail. Quite a formidable looking character. Unfortunately, his self-consciousness made him a bit stand-offish and gave him the appearance of being arrogant. He was fairly intolerant of Bert’s youth, his appearance and his over-drinking and he tended to make a joke of him. But at the same time he was a massive musical influence on Bert. He was an amazing guitar teacher.’