Davey Graham

Davey Graham

David Michael Gordon Graham, known as Davey Graham (originally Davy Graham), (26 November 1940–15 December 2008), was a British guitarist and one of the most influential figures in the 1960s British folk revival. He inspired many famous practitioners of the fingerstyle acoustic guitar such as Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Martin Carthy, John Martyn, Paul Simon and Jimmy Page, who may have based his solo "White Summer" on Graham's "She moved thru' the Bizarre/Blue Raga" and "Mustapha". Graham is probably best-known for his acoustic instrumental, "Anji" and for his pioneering use of DADGAD tuning, later widely adopted by acoustic guitarists.

It was not in Graham's nature to pursue fame and fortune and he retired to relative obscurity for many years, when he engaged in charity work and teaching as well as protracted periods of drug use, before beginning to tour again in the years before his death. His childlike, almost obsessive, enthusiasm for music never left him, however, and he would gladly give a free private concert to any chance acquaintance.

Biography

Early life

Graham was born in Hinckley, Leicestershire, England, to a Guyanese mother and a Scottish father. Although he never had any music theory lessons he learnt to play the piano and harmonica as a child and then took up the classical guitar at the age of 12. As a teenager he was strongly influenced by the folk guitar player Steve Benbow, who had travelled widely with the army and played a guitar style influenced by Moroccan music.

"Anji"/"Angi"

At the age of 19 Graham wrote what is probably his most famous composition, the acoustic guitar solo "Angi" (sometimes spelled "Anji": see below). His biographer Colin Harper credits Graham with single-handledly inventing the concept of the folk guitar instrumental (while acknowledging that John Fahey was making a similar invention, simultaneously, in the U.S.). "Angi", named after his then girlfriend, appeared on his debut EP 3/4 AD in April 1962. The tune spread through a generation of aspiring guitarists, changing its spelling as it went. Before the record was released Bert Jansch had learned it from a tape borrowed from Graham's half-sister, Jill Doyle, who was giving guitar lessons to Jansch at the time. Jansch included it on his 1965 debut album as "Angie". The spelling Anji became the more widely used after it appeared in this way on Simon & Garfunkel's 1966 album Sounds of Silence and it was as "Anji" that Chicken Shack recorded it for their 1969 100 Ton Chicken album.

Anji soon became a rite of passage for many acoustic fingerstyle guitarists, including another talented British musician, Ralph Mctell, who said of Anji "...here was a tune that combined a quirky rhythm figure with a tune of simple beauty with sexy blue notes with a hypnotic descending bass line. The hard part of this was that there were two beats to every bass note instead of the one that most of us were able to play. I was captivated and for the next few weeks played nothing else. Finally I could manage a passable version. My mates were impressed! It practically became my signature tune."

Some other musicians of note who have covered Anji include: John Renbourn, Gordon Giltrap, Clive Carrol and even the anarchist group Chumbawamba who used the guitar piece as a basis for their anti-war song "Jacob's Ladder".

Folk fame

During the 1960s Graham released a string of albums of music from all around the world in all kinds of genres. 1964's Folk, Blues and Beyond and the following year's collaboration with the folk singer Shirley Collins, Folk Roots, New Roots, are frequently cited among his most influential album releases. Graham also came to the attention of guitarists through his appearance in a 1959 broadcast of the BBC TV arts series Monitor, produced by Ken Russell and entitled Hound Dogs and Bach Addicts: The Guitar Craze, in which he played an acoustic instrumental version of Cry Me a River.

Graham's spontaneity made him unreliable and unpredictable, which did little to advance his fame or endear him to concert organisers and the more commercial elements of the music world. In the late 1960s he was booked for a tour of Australia but, when his plane stopped for an hour in Bombay, he changed his plans and spent the next six months wandering through India. His continuous touring of the world, picking up and then recording different styles of music for the guitar, has resulted in many musicians crediting him with founding world music. However, though Graham recorded in a variety of genres and loved to play the oud, he was no purist, absorbing all his influences into his own ever-expanding conception of the possibilities of guitar music. Quizzed, for instance, on his introduction of a chord progression into an Arab maqam, his amiable retort was to the effect that, if he felt like it and it sounded alright, why shouldn't he?

Retirement

Graham married the American singer Holly Gwinn in the late 1960s and recorded the album Godington Boundary with her in 1970, shortly before their marriage broke up. By the end of the 1960s and the release of the album Hat (described by The Times as 'fascinating but undeniably eccentric') he was experimenting with cocaine, LSD and opium. He ceased to work and entered a period of obscurity and comparative poverty: in this respect he is often compared with other musicians such as Syd Barrett and Peter Green. He later described himself as having been "a casualty of too much self-indulgence". During this period he taught acoustic guitar and also undertook charity work, particularly for various mental health charities. For several years he was on the executive council of Mind and he was involved for some time with the mystic Osho.

Rediscovery and death

He was the subject of a 2005 BBC Radio documentary Whatever Happened to Davy Graham ? and in 2006 featured in the BBC Four documentary Folk Britannia.

Many people found Davy over the years and tried to encourage him to return to the stage to play live. Many claimed to have rediscovered him but this was not so difficult if one was familiar with Camden Town, as Davy was well known there. The last of this long line of seekers was Mark Pavey who arranged some outings with guitarists and old friends including Bert Jansch, Duck Baker and Martin Carthy. These concerts were typically eclectic, with Graham playing a mix of acoustic blues, Romanian dance tunes, Irish pipe tunes, songs from South Africa and pieces by Bach. His final album, Broken Biscuits consisted of originals and new arrangements of traditional songs from around the world.

Graham was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008 and died on 15 December 2008. He is survived by his two daughters, Mercy and Kim.

Influence

Although he never achieved great commercial success (and indeed perhaps did not seek it), Graham's music received positive critical feedback, and has proved to be influential. He has inspired folk revival artists and fellow players such as Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Martin Carthy, Ralph Mctell, John Martyn, Nick Drake and Paul Simon: Folk Rock bands such as Fairport Convention and Pentangle also show his influence. In the 80s there were British guitar bands like The Smiths, whose guitarist Johnny Marr has cited Davey Graham as a big influence. In 2009, the Graham Coxon album The Spinning Top was cited by NME as being influenced by the finger picking style of Graham.

Though Graham is commonly referred to as a folk musician, the diversity of his music ranges in many different directions. Strong influence from genres such as blues, jazz and Middle Eastern music is evident throughout his work.

One of Graham's lasting legacies is the DADGAD (Open Dsus4) guitar tuning which he introduced to British guitarists in the early 1960s, though it is not clear if it originated with him. He devised this tuning whilst travelling in Morocco in order to translate the traditional oud music he was hearing to the guitar. Graham then went on to experiment playing traditional folk pieces in DADGAD tuning often incorporating middle eastern scales and melodies, a good example is his arrangement of the traditional air (believed to be Irish) "She Moved Through The Fair". The tuning allows a guitarist freedom to improvise in the treble while maintaining a solid underlying harmony and rhythm in the bass, though it restricts the number of keys in which the instrument can readily be played. While 'non-standard', or 'non-classical' tunings were widely practiced by guitarists before this (Open E and Open G tunings were in common use by blues and slide guitar players) DADGAD introduced a new "standard" tuning. The tuning is widely used by many guitarists, though is especially favoured in the genres of folk and world music. The French guitarist Pierre Bensusan plays exclusively in the DADGAD tuning.

Martin Carthy described Graham as "an extraordinary, dedicated player, the one everyone followed and watched - I couldn't believe anyone could play like that" while Bert Jansch claimed that he was "courageous and controversial - he never followed the rules. He was a hard man to hold a conversation with, but he knew how to play the guitar." Ray Davies maintained that the guitarist was "the greatest blues players I ever saw, apart from Big Bill Broonzy".

According to George Chkiantz, "What impressed me with Davy Graham... was he played the guitar fretboard somehow as if it was a keyboard. There was a kind of freedom. You weren't conscious of him using chord shapes at all: his fingers just seemed to run around with complete freedom on the fretboard."

Discography

• 3/4 AD (EP) (*) (1962)
• From a London Hootenanny (EP)(1963)
• The Guitar Player (1963)
• Folk, Blues and Beyond (1964)
• Midnight Man (1966)
• Large as Life and Twice as Natural (1968)
• Hat (1969)
• Holly Kaleidoscope (1970)
• Godington Boundary (1970) (with Holly Gwinn)
• All That Moody (1976)
• The Complete Guitarist (1978)
• Dance for Two People (1979)
• Folk Blues and All Points in Between (1985)
• Playing in Traffic (1991)
• The Guitar Player ... Plus (1996)
• After Hours (1997)
• The Best Of Davy Graham (A Scholar & A Gentleman) (2009)

Collaborations

• Folk Roots, New Routes (1965) with Shirley Collins
• Broken Biscuits (2007) with Davy Graham

Filmography

• The Servant, directed by Joseph Losey in 1963 portrays an uncredited Graham as a guitarist playing.
• Cain's Film, a short directed by Jamie Wadhawan in 1969, features Graham as himself (playing "Rock Me"), along with Alexander Trocchi, William Burroughs, Feliks Topolski and Shawn Phillips, also as themselves. Graham is also credited as the composer.
• He can also be seen in Cry Me a River, a 1959 BBC documentary of guitar playing.
• He also appears in a 1963 British Folk programme called Hullabaloo (not to be confused with the American mid 60s pop show of the same name) where he backs American folk singer Carolyn Hester.

Bibliography

• Harper, Colin (2005) Irish Folk, Trad and Blues: a Secret History
• Harper, Colin (2006) Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival. Bloomsbury ISBN 0-7475-8725-6
• Hodgkinson, Will (2005) Article in The Guardian; Friday 15 July 2005
• The Times (2008) Obituary published in The Times, 22 December 2008, p. 50 [1]

External links

• Davey Graham Official Website
• Article by John Renbourn and discography at the Folk Blues and Beyond site
• Interview given to www.terrascope.co.uk