"IT WAS late at night," said the Croydon-born guitarist Wizz Jones, recalling his 1959 Parisian reunion with Davy Graham (as he spelled it until the late 1970s), "and he suddenly came round the corner. I remember seeing this vision of this tall, blon
d-haired, statuesque, deep tanned god-type of person as he was walking toward me. I thought, 'That's what I want to be!' And he said, 'I've just come up from Greece, man.' He was so cool."
"He was," says the Scots folksinger and broadcaster Archie Fisher, "the first guitarist in terms of anything to do with jazz and blues and open tunings and all the rest. He was the definitive guitarist. And though Martin (Carthy] and other instrumentalists were developing on their own, he was the point of reference. He had a wider spectrum of styles than most people have."
The dapperly dressed Graham and his questing vision became bywords for eclecticism. His influence is immense. He continually re-set the height of the bar, thereby acting as an inspiration for Martin Carthy, Bert Jansch, Keith Christmas, Jimmy Page, John Renbourn, Paul Simon and many, many others. His composition Anji, one he brought back from France in 1959, was a rite of passage for guitarists. Jansch and Simon both recorded it.
He quartered musical terrains, assimilating Europe's folk traditions, blues, jazz, show tunes, singer-songwriter material, modal forms from North Africa and the Indian subcontinent, Christian hymnody and European art music in search of material to play or adapt. Frequently he created highly impressionistic results. He could not copy if his life depended on it. By the time a piece emerged from his mind, likely as not, it emerged radically reconfigured. Highlights of this process include Maajan – his souvenir of Tangier named after Morocco's sticky hashish confectionery (generally transliterated majoon nowadays) – and his masala rendition of She Moved Through The Fair which added enough raga-like structure to Padraic Colum's Irish framework for Redd Sullivan to re-title it She Moved Through The Curry. Ponder the implications inherent in Hornpipe For Harpsichord Played Upon Guitar (from Henry Purcell).
Born David Michael Gordon Graham, his father Hamish McLeod was from Skye and not only spoke Gaelic as his first language, he taught it. His son dutifully completed the exercises in Roderick Mackinnon's Teach Yourself… self-improvement tutor for Scots Gaelic. His mother was from British Guiana – now Guyana – and Winifred introduced his ears to other sorts of musicality – as well as French. "I had to think like a mongrel," he affirmed positively. "Like a hybrid. You're not talking to an Englishman. You're talking to an Anglo-Scot who has got Caribbean blood."
Skiffle spun his head. "I couldn't concentrate at school," he told me, "thinking of Lonnie Donegan." He took up guitar in 1956, began listening assiduously to blues and jazz. In July 1958, he left school, did his share of dead-end jobs and discovered the Continent. He busked in Paris, on the Côte d'Azur, Greece and Morocco and basked in the otherness of life lit by a different sun.
On the evening of 7 June, 1959, the BBC's Monitor televised Ken Russell's third completed commission for the arts series. Hound Dogs and Bach Addicts: The Guitar Craze included footage the 18-year-old guitarist playing Cry Me A River. The cold brick tenement setting matched the devastated mood of Julie London's 1955 hit. It became a staple of television documentaries and was parachuted into the BBC's 2006 Folk Britannia series. Graham dazzled television audiences from Hullabaloo in the 1960s to Acoustic Routes – BBC Scotland's documentary with Bert Jansch in the "hero role" in the 1990s and beyond.
Though as a general rule, Graham made great tracks rather than great albums, even in one of his darkest patches ("I have had a bit of 'raveage' in my life"), he summoned up three works worthy of remembering him by. His and Shirley Collins' Folk Roots, New Routes (1964) is a tightrope walk that works. His Folk, Blues & Beyond (1965), especially in its expanded 2005 edition on Fledg'ling, reveals the majesty that Archie Fisher described. Complementing them is After Hours at Hull University (1997), an intimate private party recorded by the ex-Viper John Pilgrim in February 1967. Its segue from She Moved Thru' The Bizarre into Graham's Blue Raga is a Hiberno-Indian creation incorporating, he drolly wrote in the notes to Large as life and twice as natural (1969), "ideas from Scots and other modal music".
Graham began so much. He dreamed the impossible dream. Time and time again the listener will reach for the album notes to double-check which year something was recorded. Yet when he came to pursuing somebody else's dream of him as the guitar hero, he remarked candidly, "I've tried to outlive the stereotype. I jumped off the bus." For all that, Davey Graham was it.
Hall is survived by his siblings Jill and Steve, his ex-wife Holly (with whom he recorded Godington Boundry in 1970) and daughters Kim and Mercy.
The full article contains 865 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
