posted 4/28/2008 6:11:36 PM

Davy Graham

by Steve Krakow

To document the large spanning influence of Davy Graham would be like doing so with Bach or Dylan---the seeds they planted became the roots of so many diverse trees with branches blossoming into buds which in turn birthed flowers, fruit and other mutant fauna-- it would be impossible to begin or end in one’s assessment. I’ve interviewed members of Incredible String Band, Pentangle and COB, and all aforementioned groundbreaking folkies stopped in their tracks at the mere mention of his name—and they all offered the same credo, that Davy was simply “the man.”--aka the for-real trailblazer and innovator who learned by living, traveling, vagabonding, and studying/delving into previously undocumented cultures’ sounds.

It made sense for Graham to have interest in other lands’ indigenous tunings and musical patterns, considering his own unique origins. Davy was born in England in 1940, but his father was an Isle of Skye Scotsman, who taught Gaelic and was a singer himself. His mother hailed from Georgetown, British Guyana—and it is from her that he inherited both Asian and Native American characteristics. In secondary school Graham suffered an accident which left him with only 20 percent vision in one eye, but that did not stop him from immediately thereafter plunging into the musician lifestyle. His earliest influence was the mighty Leadbelly, along with other seminal blues cats like Big Bill Broonzy, Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf. The folk idiom entered his vocabulary early on too, Jack Elliot and of course Dylan, but Graham was never content to stop there. He easily soaked up jazz (from Charlie Parker to Miles Davis), gospel, flamenco, classical, Elizabethan folk music, and maybe most significantly, Arabic music and Indian ragas. Davy was also influenced by Steve Benbow, another guitarist who took solace in Moroccan flavors. But it was Graham who indeed traveled to Morocco, and most likely picked up the famous ‘acid folk” tuning “DADGAD” which was then played to Incredible String Band’s Robin Williamson, Clive Palmer and John Renbourn. Renbourn in fact, pointed out to me the startling similarity between what Graham and Sandy Bull were doing concurrently on both sides of the Atlantic—exploring “blends” of eastern and western motifs, also allowing the musician more room to improvise along various lines as well. This far-reaching influence was even spread to Jimmy Page and Paul Simon.

It should be noted Graham visited these inspirational far-off lands in true vagabond fashion as well, literally hitchhiking for camel rides, singing for his supper, and working at a hash cafe in Tangiers. Graham “lived the life” and all who encountered him knew it—which seemed to be nearly everyone of musical importance. Graham still had delirious highs in his career in between busking, like maintaining a swanky pad in Malaga overlooking the Mediterranean for a spell, or performing in Paris for Elizabeth Taylor (though he was also jailed for 4 nights for playing on the street).

Graham was also proficient at banjo, bass, and harmonica and a cool-water voiced singer. At a mere age 19, he wrote arguably his most famous piece “Angi,” named after his then-current girlfriend. Released on his first EP, “ ¾ AD” from April, 1962, this global-spanning tune influenced an entire generation of guitar players, and was covered by all from Bert Jansch to Simon & Garfunkel—it was even taken on my blooze-heavies Chicken Shack. This followed up the acclaim that an even younger Graham had made appearing in the 1959 TV film, “Hound Dogs and Bach Addicts: The Guitar Craze” on the BBC. Graham also released a flurry of albums, each breaking new ground- “From a London Hootenanny” (EP 1963),” “The Guitar Player” (EP 1963), and the ambitious “Folk, Blues and Beyond” (1964).

"Folk, Blues..” was a pretty complete statement-- his earliest love, Leadbelly, is represented in the first cut, which morphs into “Leavin Blues” after journeying to the East and back. “Cocaine” was in fact played to Graham by Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, and was to become a standard for edgy folkies like NY’s Dave Van Ronk. Traditional pieces like “Sally Free And Easy” and “Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair” are turned inside out, but are still effortlessly gorgeous. Occasional collaborator and seminal UK blues-boom figure Alexis Korner turned Graham onto Bill Broonzy’s “Rock Me Baby.” Setting the template for the “baroque-folk” movement if you will, was Davy’s take on “Seven Gypsies,” a variant on the song “Raggle-Taggle-O,” and Graham veers into jazz territory with “Moanin’,” a Bobby Timmons instrumental. “Skillet (Good N’ Greasy)” was learnt from an Appalachian banjo player, and “Maajun” is based on an eastern melody discovered in Tangiers. Champion Jack Dupree showed “Goin’ Down Slow” to Graham, and he took on another folk-blues lament, Blind Willie Johnson’s “I Can’t Keep from Cryin’ Sometimes” as well. Original numbers still crept in too, like the lonely-vibed “Ain’t Nobody’s Business What I Do.” The whole LP is capped off by a progressive (blues in 6/8 time) take on a Charles Mingus’ “Better Get It In Your Soul.”

Graham followed up with the absolutely masterful collaboration, “Folk Roots, New Routes”(1965) with the first-lady of British folk, Shirley Collins. This album rewrote the rule book on traditional folk, with radical reworkings of ancient songs broken down to the spare elements of Davy’s unique guitar plucking and Collins’ stately voice, and blowing the doors open on the folk medium, period.

Next up was 1966’s “Midnight Man,” his second full LP with even more esoteric covers-- with jazzy pieces like Lalo Schifrin’s “The Fakir’ or Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” alongside more “pop” numbers like the Beatles’ “I’m Looking Thru You” and Rufus Thomas’s pop/blues/soul hit “Walkin’ The Dog.” The album also saw more originals Like “No Preacher blues” and “Hummingbird” appear, as well as the maturation of his voice and more complex guitar arrangements. The LP was also well-loved and accepted by the counterculture “beat poets” like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

“After Hours” (1967) was recorded at Hull University but not released til 1997, so his next proper LP, “Large as Life and Twice as Natural” was released in 1968 to wide acclaim, and featured the expanded and quite brilliant line-up of Pentangle’s Danny Thompson on double bass, John Hiseman on drums, and Colosseum’s Dick Heckstall-Smith on saxophone. Sure, Graham takes on familiar subjects like Leadbelly (“Good Morning Blues”) or odd pop-folk covers like Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”, and blues standards like Fred McDowell’s “Freight Train Blues,” but even these numbers feature the worldly colors provided by the band. Originals like “Sunshine Raga” and “Blues Raga” showed just how deeply Graham could lose himself in modal Eastern expression.

1969’s “The Hat” is another impressive document—also with Danny Thompson, but this time featuring drummer John Spooner. Beginning with a folky take on the Beatles’ “Getting Better” and fleshed out with more covers (two more Simon & Garfunkel numbers), like another immortal blues cut, Willie Dixon’s “Hoochie Coochie Man.” However there are also off-the-wall choices like Art Blakely’s “Buhaina Chant” and the mesmerizing “Bulgarian Dance.” This album wasn’t released in the US, and is rarer than most in his catalog.

Graham would continue to release LPs throughout the 70’s, like “ Holly Kaleidoscope” (1970), “Goddington Boundary”(1970) ,” “All that Moody”(1976), “The Complete Guitarist”(1978), “Dance for Two People”(1979), and even in 1985, “Folk Blues And All Points In Between.” Davy would appear in a few more films and play live sporadically, sometimes with troubled results, but the genius still resides in the soul of a man who changed the musical world, on a visionary quest to the heart of what made many forms of music truly alive.

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