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British Folk And Traditional

Fairport's voice, then her own

Sandy Denny

Sandy Denny trained briefly as a nurse and did a foundation course at Kingston College of Art before the London folk clubs claimed her. After a spell with the Strawbs in 1967, she auditioned for Fairport Convention in May 1968, and Simon Nicol later said she stood out from the other hopefuls "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes." She left at the end of 1969 to form Fotheringay with Trevor Lucas, whom she married in 1973, and then made four solo albums. Melody Maker readers voted her Britain's best female singer in 1970 and 1971, and she is still the only guest vocalist ever to appear on a Led Zeppelin album. She died in April 1978, aged 31, of a brain haemorrhage after a fall. Her daughter Georgia was nine months old.

Named after a house in Muswell Hill

Fairport Convention

Fairport Convention took their name from Fairport, a house in Muswell Hill, North London, where Ashley Hutchings and Simon Nicol rehearsed above Nicol's father's medical practice. With Richard Thompson on guitar, they played their first gig in May 1967. On 12 May 1969, driving home from a gig in Birmingham, their van crashed on the M1, killing drummer Martin Lamble, nineteen, and Thompson's girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn. The survivors regrouped in a rented house in Farley Chamberlayne, Hampshire, with fiddler Dave Swarbrick, and turned to traditional English song. The result, Liege & Lief, was named the most influential folk album of all time at the 2006 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. A farewell concert in the Oxfordshire village of Cropredy in August 1979 turned into an annual festival, and the band carried on.

John Peel's label began with her

Bridget St John

Born Bridget Hobbs in East Molesey, Surrey, Bridget St John first sang for audiences while studying at Sheffield University. A stay in Aix-en-Provence in 1967 led, through the American songwriter Robin Frederick, to John Martyn. In 1968 a poet friend put her in touch with John Peel, and Peel and Clive Selwood set up their Dandelion label initially to release her music. Her 1969 debut, Ask Me No Questions, was produced by Peel in about ten hours, with Martyn on second guitar on several tracks. Two more Dandelion albums and one for Chrysalis followed. Then she moved to Greenwich Village in 1976 and stayed largely out of view for twenty years, coming back with a new album in 1996.

Three albums, recognised too late

Nick Drake

Nick Drake was born in Rangoon, Burma, in 1948 and grew up in Tanworth-in-Arden, Warwickshire. He was studying English at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, when Fairport Convention's Ashley Hutchings introduced him to producer Joe Boyd in December 1967, and he signed to Island Records at twenty. His three albums (Five Leaves Left in 1969, Bryter Layter in 1971 and Pink Moon in 1972) sold poorly in his lifetime. The last was recorded over two nights with only engineer John Wood in the room, and runs about 28 minutes. Drake died at his parents' home in November 1974, aged 26, from an overdose of a prescribed antidepressant, and the coroner recorded a verdict of suicide. In 1999 a Volkswagen advert in the US used one of his recordings, and his American album sales went from about 6,000 that year to 74,000 the next.

London to Skye by horse and wagon

Vashti Bunyan

Vashti Bunyan was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1945 and was expelled from the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford in 1964 for spending her time on guitar and songwriting. A year later Andrew Loog Oldham signed her and released her first single. Fed up with the business, she set out with her partner Robert Lewis on a trip by horse and wagon that took nearly two years, from London toward the Isle of Skye, drawn by Donovan's talk of an artists' community there. She wrote her songs on the way. Joe Boyd produced them as Just Another Diamond Day, released by Philips in December 1970. It sold very few copies, and she left music to raise three children. A CD reissue in 2000 found a new generation of listeners, and she came back with Lookaftering in 2005 and Heartleap in 2014.

The singer the singers learned from

Anne Briggs

Anne Briggs was born in Toton, Nottinghamshire, in 1944. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was young, and she was raised by an aunt and uncle. Noticed at a Centre 42 concert in Nottingham in 1962, she joined that touring festival at seventeen, and her unaccompanied singing went on to shape a generation. It was Briggs who taught Bert Jansch a traditional song he recorded in 1966, and Jimmy Page, Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson are among those she influenced. She released only two albums at the time, both in 1971. A third, recorded in March 1973, sat on the shelf until 1997 because she was unhappy with her singing on it. She stepped away from performing and settled in the north of Scotland, and later the Hebrides.

Sussex songs, a Southern journey

Shirley Collins

Shirley Collins was born in Hastings in 1935 and met the American folklorist Alan Lomax at a party at Ewan MacColl's in 1954. From July to November 1959 she travelled with him through the American South, recording singers including Mississippi Fred McDowell and Almeda Riddle. Back in England she made Folk Roots, New Routes with guitarist Davey Graham in 1964, Anthems in Eden in 1969 with her sister Dolly on portative organ, and, in 1971, the year she married Ashley Hutchings, No Roses with the first Albion Country Band. After their divorce she developed dysphonia, lost her singing voice and stopped performing. She came back in November 2016 with Lodestar, her first album in 38 years, followed by Heart's Ease in 2020 and Archangel Hill in 2023. She was appointed MBE in 2007.

The Collection