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Folk

Buffalo to London, one album

Jackson C. Frank

Jackson C. Frank was born Jackson Carey Jones in Buffalo, New York, in 1943. In 1954 a furnace blew up at his elementary school in Cheektowaga and killed fifteen students. He got out with burns over more than half his body, and while he recovered a teacher brought him a guitar. At 21 he received an insurance payout of $110,500, and in February 1965 he moved to England. Paul Simon produced his only album, Jackson C. Frank, recorded in London in six hours that year. He went out with Sandy Denny and pushed her to give up nursing for music. Then came mental illness, the death of an infant son and years of homelessness. He died in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in March 1999, aged 56.

Fairport's voice, then her own

Sandy Denny

Sandy Denny trained for a short while as a nurse and did a foundation course at Kingston College of Art before the London folk clubs took her over. After a spell with the Strawbs in 1967 she auditioned for Fairport Convention in May 1968. Simon Nicol later said she stood out from the other hopefuls "like a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes." At the end of 1969 she left 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. 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.

Edinburgh, Transatlantic, 1965

Bert Jansch

Bert Jansch was born in Glasgow in 1943 and grew up in Edinburgh. There he found his way into the Howff folk club, and in August 1960 he gave up his job as a nurseryman to play full time. In London he met producer Bill Leader, who recorded him at home on a reel-to-reel machine. Transatlantic bought the tape for £100 and issued it as Bert Jansch in 1965. He made Bert and John with John Renbourn in 1966, and in 1967 the two of them formed Pentangle. Basket of Light was the band's commercial high point. Nick Drake, Donovan, Neil Young and Johnny Marr were among those he influenced. He died of lung cancer in London in October 2011, aged 67.

Dublin neighbours, married in 1968

Gay and Terry Woods

Gay and Terry Woods grew up as neighbours in Dublin, started performing together as teenagers and married in 1968. In those same years Terry was also playing in Sweeney's Men. This was long before he joined the Pogues in the mid-1980s as a multi-instrumentalist, and before Gay's stretch as an original member of Steeleye Span. Backwoods, their 1975 duo album for Polydor, was recorded at London's Marquee Studios, with King Crimson's Mike Giles sitting in on drums.

Dublin schoolgirls, one album, 1972

Mellow Candle

Clodagh Simonds and Alison Bools were still schoolgirls, fifteen and sixteen, when Mellow Candle released their first single in 1968. By the time the full band recorded its only album, Swaddling Songs, for Deram in 1972, guitarist Dave Williams, bassist Frank Boylan and drummer William Murray had joined the two songwriters. It sold poorly and the band split within a year. Decades later it became one of the most sought-after cult records in British and Irish progressive folk, and original vinyl copies now go for far more than anyone paid for the LP when it came out.

Detroit, Sussex Records, 1970

Rodriguez

Sixto Rodriguez was born in Detroit in 1942, the sixth child of Mexican immigrant parents who came for the city's industrial jobs. He released Cold Fact in 1970 and Coming from Reality in 1971 on Sussex Records. Neither sold much in the US, and the label dropped him two weeks before Christmas 1971. He kept working in demolition and on production lines. Meanwhile his records became hugely popular in South Africa, where rumours had him dead, and in Australia, where he toured in 1979 and 1981. His daughter came across a fan website, which led to a first South African tour in 1998, and Malik Bendjelloul's documentary Searching for Sugar Man won the Academy Award in 2013. He died in August 2023, aged 81.

Yale painter, ESP-Disk, 1968

Ed Askew

Ed Askew was born in Stamford, Connecticut, on 1 December 1940 and studied painting at the Yale School of Art, graduating in 1966. He started writing songs around the time he picked up a Martin tiple while teaching at a Connecticut prep school. Bernard Stollman offered him a contract with ESP-Disk, which put out Ask the Unicorn in 1968. He lived mostly in New Haven until he moved to New York City around 1987. The next album, the self-released These Nights and Days, didn't come until 1999. Later records included Imperfiction on Drag City in 2011, For the World with Sharon Van Etten in 2013 and London in 2020, and Tin Angel reissued Ask the Unicorn in 2015. He died on 4 January 2025, aged 84.

A demo tape handed to Will Oldham

Alasdair Roberts

Alasdair Roberts was born in Germany to a Scottish father who played folk music and grew up near Callander. He formed Appendix Out as a teenager in 1994, and after a 1995 concert he handed Will Oldham a demo tape. Soon after, the band signed to Drag City, the Chicago label Oldham recorded for, and the meeting started a long-running collaboration between the two. His solo debut came in 2003. The records since then have kept mixing traditional Scottish and British ballad forms with his own songwriting, which has grown denser and more mythic over time.

The Mayor of MacDougal Street

Dave Van Ronk

Dave Van Ronk was born in Brooklyn in June 1936 and grew up in Queens. He quit high school for the Merchant Marine and played in traditional jazz bands before the records of Reverend Gary Davis, Furry Lewis and Mississippi John Hurt pulled him toward blues. They called him the Mayor of MacDougal Street. He was at the center of Greenwich Village's 1960s coffeehouse scene and was one of Bob Dylan's first mentors. His records run from Folkways in 1959, through Inside Dave Van Ronk and his Ragtime Jug Stompers in 1964, to Sunday Street in 1976. He died in New York in February 2002, aged 65. The Coen brothers took scenes from his memoir for Inside Llewyn Davis.

The Collection