On the night that they launched the reissue of these albums, I stood on the very spot which had been the stage of Les Cousins in Soho's Greek Street and remembered what it had been like as a nervous youth doing my first gig there, way back in the 1960s. Davy (or Davey, as it is often spelled) Graham was less than a decade older than me, but when you're still in your teens, that's nearly a whole generation - and to sit on the same stool and play into the same microphone that earth-striding giants such as him had recently done was a bit like preparing for your first moonshot. Which probably means that I'm the wrong person to be reviewing these CDs, because there's no way that I can lift them out of their time and put myself in the shoes of somebody coming to them fresh, who has the knowledge of all the music that has passed in the intervening 40 years, who has heard everybody from Ali Farka Toure to Pierre Bensusan before they first heard Davey GrahamŠ
And yet, considering all the other things I've forgotten, I still clearly remember first hearing Folk, Blues & Beyond and its predecessor EP 3/4 AD on repeat play at a party and having my mind comprehensively blown. It was not that long since my having nigh-simultaneously discovered blues, jazz, folk music and even heard my first African music and old-time country; here was a guy who - apparently effortlessly - mixed the whole lot up like they were meant to exist together. I'd heard nothing like this before. Through his extraordinary, literally unbelievable guitar playing, it soon became apparent to even my uneducated mind that there was a good reason for this: nobody had ever done it before! It was only years later that it struck me that the reason I liked his singing as well was that he did it in his normal English accent - unlike the rest of the people around who were trying to be Dylan, or Jack Elliott, or Muddy Waters, or a rural singer from East Anglia, Davey was just busy being himself. When you heard the first guitar bars of Leavin' Blues it hinted at out there in Asia or North Africa; when he started singing Leadbelly's words you were here and now in England.
Cyril Tawney's Sally Free And Easy, Uncle Dave Macon's Skillet Good 'n' Greasy, the traditional Seven Gypsies and Black Is The Colour, Dylan's Don't Think Twice, tunes by Mingus and Bobby Timmons, Davey's North African exploration Maajun - on this issue's fRoots 25 CD - all sat so naturally together you didn't question it. Small wonder that other musicians of the day from Martin Carthy to Jimmy Page to Bert Jansch all listened in awe and were profoundly influenced, and music changed forever. Bigger wonder that Davey's name is still only known to the few: truly, the second mouse always gets the cheese.
Neatly and lovingly repackaged and reissued by Fledg'ling, Folk, Blues & Beyond is fleshed out with his seminal She Moved Through The Fair, another North African spiced tune, Mustapha, and the whole of the 3/4 AD EP with Alexis Korner in which you can hear the later Jansch/ Renbourn style explode into being before your very ears. The incredible, life-affirming sound of books being rewritten: if you own only one British 'folk' record from the 1960s, this ought to be a strong candidate.
By the end of the 1960s, Davey's problems with life's great chemistry set had begun to take their toll. Sad, sad things happened like seeing him play an entire gig with his back to the audience. Folk Roots New Routes, Midnight Man and Larger Than Life And Twice As Natural had added to the mythology in various ways, and occasionally the spark would be there on a gig but you could never predict. 1969's Hat - including Danny Thompson on bass - was to be the last of his collectable works. While the musical mix was pretty similar to FB&B, little strains were creeping into his voice and sometimes he would simply strum (for example on less than awe-inspiring covers of the Beatles' Getting Better and Paul Simon's I Am A Rock). But the spark was still definitely alight, and the best tracks on here sit nicely alongside FB&B's uniform excellence: well worth having to complete the set. The intervening ones will be along from Mr Fledg'ling later this year. - Ian Anderson, fRoots
Davy Graham