Topic: Davey Graham RIP

[GerryC]

I learned with sadness today of the passing of Davy Graham on Dec 15th. Although not himself strictly a country blues player, he was deeply influenced by the genre and turned an entire generation of UK guitar players in the direction of the blues - and jazz and Celtic melodies and North African and Indian music... Learning to play Angi was a rite of passage for so many of us in the 1960s.

~May he rest in peace.

Gerry C

[Bunker Hill]

I'd better dig out the Topic EP and give Angi a spin.

A friend went to see Davy Graham perform a couple of years ago at the Troubador, Earls Court. He told me that Graham really wasn't up to it and Wizz Jones had to come from the audience to finish set.

[outfidel]

RIP indeed...

[Rivers]

Although not himself strictly a country blues player, he was deeply influenced by the genre and turned an entire generation of UK guitar players in the direction of the blues - and jazz and Celtic melodies and North African and Indian music... Learning to play Angi was a rite of passage for so many of us in the 1960s.

I was also one of those players Davey's work in the 60s UK affected mightily. Anji I worked on for hours and hours. Look for reissues of his recordings to go triple platinum now he's gone.

RIP Davey, and thanks for the inspiration.

[dj]

Oddly enough, before the advent of YouTube I'd only ever heard Davey Graham backing up Shirley Collins on the Folk Roots, New Routes LP.  But it seems like every British acoustic guitar player who came of age in the 1960s, from Martin Carthy to Bert Jansch to (gulp!) Jimmy Page cites him as an influence, and I consider my lack of familiarity with Graham's work a major hole in my musical knowledge.  I'm sorry to see him go.

[Parlor Picker]

Very sad news indeed.  He's the man who (allegedly) invented DADGAD tuning which has been adopted by folkies far and wide.  He certainly was the "godfather" figure to all the sixties acoustic guitarists in Britain and subsequently beyond.

Totally irrelevant, but I once saw him on a train from London to Leeds in the early seventies.  It was during a period when he was not very prominent on the scene, but I was pleased I recognised him and quite chuffed to see him.  We did not speak, as he was in conversation with an elderly lady sitting close to him.

[Chezztone]

I think I've recommended it before on this site, but Graham's death provides another good reason to pick up (and read) Will Hodgkinson's Guitar Man, a book I think you'll all enjoy anyway, but especially if you feel any connection to Graham's music! Cheers, SC

[Mr.OMuck]

What a cool Video! A real little gem. Very nice playing. Too bad.

[Parlor Picker]

I was directed to this YouTube clip on the Larriv?e Forum.  It is an extract from a BBC documentary called "Folk Britannia" and features Davy himself, as well as comments from the likes of Martin Carthy, Dick Gaughan. Shirley Collins and Bert Jansch.

[Bunker Hill]

Here's an obit from yesterday's Independent by ex-Vipers Skiffle Group member, John Pilgrim.

Davy Graham:
Virtuoso guitarist at the heart of the British folk revival
whose playing influenced a generation

Wednesday, 17 December 2008

The guitarist Davy Graham was one of those seminal talents who change the way music is made. His invented guitar tunings were copied by players all over the world and one of his own pieces, "Anji", provided a soundtrack for the Sixties. Folkies listened to him in amazement and blues players with envy. His records were found on the floors of rock groups' Transit vans, in the festering cubby hole that was the band room of Ronnie Scott's "Old Place", and in the more commodious environs of orchestral players' dressing rooms.

He was as omnipresent as that compulsive opening riff to "Anji" (which recently featured as the opening theme to BBC 4's Folk Britannia series in 2006). One moment he'd be at the Festival Hall backing Shirley Abicair, the next he'd be on his way to India, Greece, Turkey or North Africa looking for answers to musical problems of which only he could conceive. He was "already returning from Tangier when the rest of us were still thinking in terms of Brighton Beach," said the guitarist John Renbourn.

Graham incorporated music from many traditions into his repertoire; he arguably invented the genre of "world music" years before the term was coined. There are few musicians playing today who don't acknowledge their debt to Graham, from folkies like Martin Carthy to heavy metal bands like Led Zeppelin. "I owe him," said Carthy. "We all do. He kicked the door down."

David Graham (he was known as Davey as well as Davy) was born in Leicester in 1940 to a Guyanan mother and a Scottish father. He lost the sight in his right eye after falling on a pencil in the playground, a loss he associated with the development of his extraordinary ear and something approaching an eidetic memory where music was concerned. In 1952, when Davy was 12, a neighbour first demonstrated a guitar to him by playing a pavane ? by the end of the afternoon the boy could play the piece perfectly.

It wasn't until he was 16 that he acquired a guitar of his own but just a year later he was playing tough pieces like Big Bill Broonzy's "House Rent Stomp". As a teenager he made a stunning impact on bohemian London. Turning up at 50 Pearman Street, a crash pad near Waterloo for out-of-work musicians and artists, he greeted everybody with the formal politeness that was his trademark and began to play an original piece based on a Broonzy line. All of us in that decrepit room felt the world change. In that twilight of the skiffle boom, Graham made Pearman Street's population immediately redundant. Here was a player who married Bill Broonzy and Charlie Mingus, whose questing mind took the whole of music as a resource for the guitar, and made something new and startling, yet extraordinarily accessible.

Failing to make a living or at that point secure any interest from record companies, Graham took off for the continent (in the company of my wife). He busked the cinema queues and the Metro in Paris, played up and down the French Riviera and for Elizabeth Taylor's parties, and visitied Greece, Italy and Tangier.

Back in England he appeared in Ken Russell's 1959 BBC Monitor documentary From Spain to Streatham (also known as Guitar Craze), playing an outrageously original contrapuntal blues, followed by "Cry Me a River". He worked with the blues musicians Alexis Korner and John Mayall and the singer Shirley Abicair, and had a residency in the then fashionable Nick's Diner in Fulham. He also made another film appearance, in Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963).

In 1961 he wrote "Anji", named after a girlfriend of the time. Recorded for Topic, it became the guitar piece that everyone struggled with and then failed to master. The sensation that "Anji" caused among musicians came to the attention of Decca, who signed Graham for a series of albums. The first, Folk, Blues and Beyond (1964) was wildly acclaimed, with The Sunday Times naming it "folk record of the year". The following year he collaborated with Shirley Collins on the critically acclaimed Folk Routes, New Routes (reissued in 1999). Other albums had less impact, although they all contained irreplaceable tracks. Listening to the recordings today one has a sense that the producers didn't know quite what to do with this boundary-ignoring talent.

His music defied categorisation. There was no room in the tightly knit modern jazz world for Graham's abilities, although several recordings show him heading in that direction. Much of his playing was blues based, though he transcended that particular idiom. It was the oft-maligned folk clubs, receptive to wacky instrumental talent, that gave him a home. In some ways he was the folk world's first postmodernist, taking influences from everywhere. The whole of music for him was simply one vast resource for the instrument whose servant he was.

Graham changed the way people thought about the guitar. He invented a modal tuning system called DADGAD, which is today used by many playing Scottish or Irish music. A stunning example can be found in the extraordinary reading of the Irish tune "She Moved Through the Fair / Blue Raga" on the Rollercoaster CD After Hours at Hull University, released in 1997 but recorded in 1967 ? at one o'clock in the morning after he'd already played a gig at the university folk club.

Over the years, illness took its toll and for whole periods Graham was in semi-retirement, punctuated by sporadic reappearances. In the Seventies he seemed set for a major comeback with recordings for Stefan Grossman's Kicking Mule label. The 1977 album The Complete Guitarist illustrates his eclecticism, featuring a Horace Silver tune, Renaissance music, Irish song, Vaughan Williams and Robert de Vis?e's Prelude from the Suite in D minor. It seemed odd to some that he did not include any North African or Indian music, but typically this was because he was learning the appropriate instruments, including the sarod and the oud, and didn't feel he was up to standard on them.

A further absence because of health problems followed the Kicking Mule period and for a while it seemed possible that he would be forgotten to all but musicians. But in 1997 the issue of After Hours created a fresh wave of interest and most of his classic albums became available again, including the seminal Folk Blues and Beyond, The Guitar Player (1963) and All That Moody (1976). A compilation, Fire in The Soul, was released in 1999.

The promise of this period was never totally fulfilled, although there were a number of impressive appearances, including at the Cambridge Folk Festival and in Edinburgh. Recently, a new manager had begun to organise tours but Graham's final illness made further public appearances impossible.

Graham never understood that his mind worked differently from others', that he marched to the beat of a different drum. The revolution he started was as much conceptual as technical; he thought about things in a different way and wasn't bound by any musical preconceptions. Dave Swarbrick, Fairport Convention's fiddle player summed it up: "There was nobody capable of doing what Davy Graham was doing, or even dreaming that it could be done."

In 2005, he was the subject of a BBC radio documentary, Whatever Happened to Davy Graham? , and the following year he was one of the artists featured in BBC 4's series Folk Britannia.

John Pilgrim

David Michael Gordon Graham, guitarist, arranger and composer: born Leicester 26 November 1940; two daughters; died London 15 December 2008

[Mr.OMuck]

There should be (already is?) a thread about the group of modal/blues-based guitarists that paralleled the folk blues scene of the early sixties and later. There's John Fahey of course, Robbie Basho, Sandy Bull, maybe, and then all the English- Celtic hybrid offshoots, and of course the more recently available African and Indian players.
I haven't always been able to embrace a lot of the music, but it certainly is an interesting phenomena that could use to have its lines of transmission established in an organized fashion.

[Rivers]

Wizz Jones  http://www.wizzjones.com/  was very influential in the same sphere around that time, had some really good left hand tricks I still can't do to this day, ended up playing gypsy jazz with Grappelli (edit, no it wasn't Wizz with Stephane, Rivers, it was Diz Dizley, another luminary but that's another story). He's still playing last I heard. Many Brit fingerpickers of a certain age will mention Wizz and Davey as primal influences.

The folk club scene in UK cities and provinces in the late 60s was full of good guitarists, many were inspired by Davey, who was a few years older and definitely 'kicked the door down', as stated in Bunker's post, for steel string acoustic guitarists in England. I was lucky, a good schoolfriend of mine's Dad ran the Turville Heath Folk Club and I would get in for free to watch those guys play eclectic mixes of folk, blues, standards and whatever else took their fancy. I remember the audience loving all of it.

I saw Bert Jansch play a solo gig a few years back in NZ. As you'd expect Bert's version of Anji has evolved into a tour de force and the set won several standing ovations from the audience, 90% of whom were guitar players I reckon. It was a great night, very nostalgic but in a totally positive way. Many players and music lovers are indebted to Davey.

[Mr.OMuck]

I just saw a documentary about Wiz Jones somewhere..here maybe? I liked his playing quite a bit and couldn't help but like him and his attachment to his hair as well. It was something about beatniks in Brighton I believe? It showed among other things how close to reality some of the Python's sketches really were.