Brit Folk

The Watersons, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Kate Rusby, Jake Bugg, The Unthanks

Blues Run the Game – A Movie About Jackson C. Frank

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This production appears to still be in the kickstarter phase, but we anxiously await the release of this documentary about the man who composed one of the greatest folk songs ever written – Blues Run the Game. 
Jackson C. Frank – such a talent and such a tragic story.
– Johnny Foreigner

Frank’s classic song “Blue Run the Game”

In the mid-60s, Jackson C. Frank released a masterpiece of folk music in Britain. 
This young American songwriter was close to Simon & Garfunkel, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Roy Stewart, Al Stewart, Sandy Denny and many others. 
All of them have been influenced by this enigmatic and tormented character. 
Shortly after the release of his only album, he disappeared. 
Wrecked by a series of tragedies in his life, he has been cut off from the world and got trapped by his demons. 

Still today, young musicians like John Mayer, Laura Marling or Robin Pecknold perform 
Blues Run the Game .

This documentary follows Jackson C. Frank’s footsteps to unknot the threads of a tragic destiny. 
Facts and songs do not express everything about a man, a personality. 
Who was Jackson C. Frank? 
Who remembers him? 
Where to find meaning, or even light, in a life as dark as his?

IMDB page

Blues Run the Game: A Movie About Jackson C. Frank

Nick Drake Celebrated In New MOJO Magazine

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HAD HE LIVED, NICK DRAKE would have been 70 this year, and fêted as one of our greatest songwriters. Yet, as friends and peers explore in the latest MOJO magazine (in UK shops from Tuesday, January 23), he wasn’t made for his times, or built to withstand the pressures of the music business.

In MOJO magazine’s 17-page celebration, Richard Thompson, Bridget St John, Joe Boyd, Linda Thompson, producer Joe Boyd and engineer John Wood talk about their friend’s music and explore his enigmatic personality, while MOJO writers tell the stories behind his magical songs.

“It’s fashionable now to believe Nick was gay,” Linda Thompson tells MOJO’s Andrew Male, “but I think, he couldn’t really relate to either sex. Affection from him was hard won. If he kissed you, you never forgot it. You’d wake up in the night and remember it. Every fibre of his being seemed to be sunk into his music.”

“If He Kissed You, You Never Forgot It. You’d Wake Up In The Night And Remember It.”  LINDA THOMPSON

Drake died in 1974, of a tragic overdose of antidepressants, long before his records were widely known. In fact it wasn’t until the mid-’90s that recognition truly dawned, as a new generation of artists, including Paul Weller, Beth Orton and others began a posthumous booster campaign, fuelled by MOJO magazine’s first Nick Drake cover story in January 1997 and sealed when the title track of Drake’s 1971 Pink Moon album appeared in a Volkswagen VW Cabrio advert in 1999.

Source: Nick Drake Celebrated In New MOJO Magazine — Mojo

The Emily Brontë Song Cycle: wandering in the wuthering heights

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Folk band the Unthanks and Adrian McNally have made an audio soundtrack pairing music with the writer’s poems as the listener walks the landscape of West Yorkshire. What is it like?

It begins with a flock of birds taking raucous flight; and even though there are no crows to be seen above the heather-flecked moors around the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, it’s difficult to discern whether this is reality, or a fantasy. I’m immersed in the latest heritage project dedicated to the literary family: a unique audio experience that combines Emily’s poetry, folk music and West Yorkshire’s grand landscape to produce something quite incredible.

The Emily Brontë Song Cycle, an audio production pairing Emily’s poems and music by folk group the Unthanks, was commissioned by the Brontë Society, which runs the sisters’ old family home the Parsonage as a hugely successful museum. The last couple of years has seen a number of Brontë bicentennial anniversaries; this year marked marked 200 years since the birth of Emily, best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights.

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