Davy Graham

For a generation of British guitar players, the name of Davy (sometimes Davey) Graham is synonymous with "Anji" which for many of us was the first standalone instrumental piece which we sweated to play. The fact that we all played the version by Bert Jansch – either directly or filtered through Paul Simon, was, of course, a subtlety which we mostly missed! I still remember the day in 1978 that I found an original copy of Davy's seminal 1964 "Folk, Blues and Beyond" album in the back of the old Head Shop on South College Street behind the University and bought it for pennies. I still have it and it continues to astonish, 29 years after I bought it and 42 years after it was recorded, despite the pops, crackles and hisses from the old and well played vinyl.

Graham was a virtuoso player and a stylistic pioneer, combining traditional folk pieces with jazz and eastern influences long before these things became fashionable and which were a million miles away from skiffle and the nascent folk scene. Listening to his early records now, after decades of copyists and the development of acoustic guitar playing, it can be difficult to appreciate just how revolutionary he was. To the modern ear many of the arrangements are of their time and his strengths are as a player rather than a vocalist, but the reality strikes the minute that you try and play one of his arrangements.

The late fifties and early sixties in UK guitar playing were times of transition. Clearly there were excellent jazz guitarists around, but they generally played big fat Gibson hollow-body electrics and were not playing 'folk' music. There remained the influence of manouche guitar as exemplified by Django Reinhardt and Skiffle had given a start to a number of players who would develop in folk music , notably Martin Carthy, and of course rhythm and blues and rock'n'roll had given rise to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Hank Marvin. In the US some technically gifted white musicians had emerged in the folk scene, such as Dave Van Ronk and John Fahey, and of course a huge number of extremely gifted black blues, jazz and rock'n'roll players were still alive and active (and influential with all the white kids taking guitar lessons from them!)

Davy Graham appeared with a Gibson acoustic guitar fresh from sojourns in Morocco and Tangiers and hit the clubs with arrangements of traditional folk, blues and jazz tunes featuring finger picking, single string runs, chording, double stopping, bends, hammer/pulls and casually threw alternative tunings and Eastern scale forms into the pot.

This was incendiary stuff. His first album, "Guitar Player" (1963), is an immaculate collection of instrumentals covering a range of styles from jazz standards to a Leroy Carr piano blues to self penned pieces and made a clear statement of his capability and range. The album was itself influential on emergent talent on the London acoustic guitar playing scene, notably the young John Renbourn. His second album under his own name, Folk, Blues and Beyond, opens with a version of Leadbelly's 'Leavin' Blues' introduced by a 'raga' scale and progressed through Tunisian inspired instrumentals and a guitar arrangement of Bobby Timmons' 'Moanin'' which still sounds as fresh as the day it was recorded. It is only mildly hyperbolic to state that the roots of all of the subsequent stylistic developments in British folk guitar can be traced to those albums taken with his album of traditional material recorded with singer Shirley Collins ("Folk Routes, New Routes") and released only a month before Folk Blues and Beyond. I have heard it said that his greatest influence was in opening the imagination of his contemporaries to the things which they could play if they tried.

In Tangiers in 1961 he came up with his second great influence - the influential DADGAD tuning for guitar - to try and create a tuning he could use on both guitar and sarod. He used this guitar tuning on his first EP on a version of "She Moves Through the Fair". He returned to this tune frequently throughout the sixties and finally re-recorded it - on sarod! - on 1976's "All That Moody". This tuning is now ubiquitous amongst 'folk' guitarists.

His albums through the sixties and the odd one or two in the seventies were, in my view at least, of erratic quality, or perhaps better to say that their bold ecclecticism hasn't always stood the test of time. His collection of (mostly) traditional tunes "The Complete Guitarist" from 1978 is a very fine recording though. This album, released on Stefan Grossman's Kicking Mule label, came complete with a TAB booklet giving an outline of how to play the tunes. I see from the sleeve that I got my copy in the old Greyfriar's Market in Edinburgh on 26 October 1979, and the booklet still bears the evidence, in the form of coffee stains, of my youthful attempts to play along!

The later sixties albums yielded some gems though, available on a great compilation from 1969 called 'Fire in the Soul' which can be found on cd. I'm listening to it as I type and it has everything, with barely a track on it which time has weakened. There is also a cd of a home recording of an impromptu session in a room in student halls of residence - After Hours at Hull University, 1967 - which I do not (yet) own. The person with the recorder then was John Pilgrim, an old friend of Davy's. This album kicked off something of a revival of attention for Davy, progress of which can be followed at the http://www.daveygraham.moonfruit.com/ website which you should visit with alacrity.

This revival has led to Davy playing gigs again around the country and a new recording is in the offing. I finally saw him live at Edinburgh Folk Club in September 2005 (see my blog entry for 23 September 2005) and had a good evening. I had the pleasure of chatting to him briefly and having a couple of LPs autographed. It would be nice if he finally achieved some of the wider recognition which he is due, although I suspect that he will remain something of a cult figure.

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Version 3: posted 7 September 2006