Singer-songwriter was known for collaborations with former husband John Martyn as well as star-studded 1960s singles and 2014 comeback album
By Ben Beaumont-Thomas
British folk singer Beverley Martyn, known for her collaborations with her former husband John Martyn as well as spirited, sublime solo work, has died aged 79.
A statement from the family of the late John Martyn announced the news, saying she died peacefully at home on Monday. “Beverley was a remarkable woman of great inner strength,” the statement continued. “She was beautiful, intelligent, warm and kind.”
Born Beverley Kutner near Coventry in 1947, she moved to London in her mid-teens to attend drama school and worked her way into the city’s folk music scene, which was flourishing in the early 1960s: she learned to play guitar from British folk legend Bert Jansch, an early boyfriend.
She released a single with her band, the Levee Breakers, the stridently jangling Babe I’m Leaving You, and also recorded solo songs including the enduring Happy New Year, a fuzz-guitar romp written by Randy Newman and featuring a pre-Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones among the session musicians. Page later said: “It was a remarkable session, at the time it was recorded I knew that she was a shining talent in the world of performance and songwriting.” Another single, Museum, was written by Donovan.
After becoming romantically involved with Paul Simon during his developmental years in London – “He had a Napoleon complex. Very intelligent. Moody, but witty,” was her assessment of him in a 2014 Guardian interview – she travelled with him to perform at the Monterey pop festival in 1967 (the culture-shifting event where Jimi Hendrix famously set his guitar on fire) and briefly appeared on the Simon & Garfunkel album Bookends, a US and UK No 1
She became a single mother to a son, Wesley, from another relationship, then met John Martyn in 1969, soon marrying him. Immersed in the folk-rock counterculture in the US, they recorded a duo album, Stormbringer!, in 1969 in Woodstock, with the Band’s Levon Helm on drums and Joe Boyd producing. It was released in 1970, and later that year they recorded and released another, The Road to Ruin (its opening track Primrose Hill would later be sampled by Fatboy Slim).
Beverley also came to know British folk star Nick Drake, who would babysit for her children; they wrote a song together, Reckless Jane, which Beverley completed in 2014.
She and John had two children of their own, but after he pursued his solo career, “my career was over”, she said in 2014. “I had my hands full. I did the odd gig with John, and the odd one on my own, but I had no future.”
Their marriage soured; John, who struggled with alcohol and drugs, became paranoid and threatening. “There was love there – it was the drink and the bad drugs, the very heavy ones, that changed his disposition, and they made life unbearable for anyone around him,” she later said. “I wouldn’t stay with a man who was killing himself.”
She escaped the marriage and moved to Brighton, fitfully making music including with Loudon Wainwright III and Wilko Johnson, but it wasn’t until her 2014 solo album, The Phoenix and the Turtle, that she made a more emphatic return. “It was a great relief to finally do something on my own terms. That was a dream I’d almost given up on,” she said of that project.
That would be her final collection of new material, though in 2018 she released a compilation of her 1960s songs, entitled Where the Good Times Are.
Today Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Department of Justice Civil Division wrote to the lawyer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation demanding that the organization drop its lawsuit against Trump’s planned ballroom on the site where the East Wing of the White House used to be.
The letter claimed that there was “another attempt on President Trump’s life” last night at the Washington Hilton, where Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives on the floor above the room where the White House Correspondents dinner was taking place last night.
The man, whom police have identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of California, sprinted through a magnetometer before authorities stopped him. Shots were fired, although it remains unclear who fired them. A Secret Service agent wearing a bulletproof vest was shot but has been released from the hospital. According to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, the government is charging Cole with two counts of using a firearm and one count of assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon.
Shumate said last night’s incident “proves, yet again, that the White House ballroom is essential for the safety and security of the President, his family, his cabinet, and his staff. When the White House ballroom is complete, President Trump and his successors will no longer need to venture beyond the safety of the White House perimeter to attend large gatherings at the Washington Hilton ballroom. The White House ballroom will ensure the safety and security of the President for decades to come.”
“Put simply,” Shumate wrote, “your lawsuit puts the lives of the President, his family, and his staff at grave risk…. Enough is enough.” He demanded the National Trust for Historic Preservation “voluntarily dismiss this frivolous lawsuit today in light of last night’s assassination attempt on President Trump. If your client does not dismiss the lawsuit by 9:00 AM on Monday, the government will move to dissolve the injunction and dismiss the case in light of last night’s extraordinary events.”
This is an odd angle to take, since, as Bluesky user Tom Shafer pointed out, the Hilton ballroom seats 2,945 people and Trump says his proposed ballroom will seat only 999. And to be clear, a judge has permitted the construction of the secure facility under the ballroom to continue despite the lawsuit; it’s just the ballroom itself that’s currently at issue.
Attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not an official requirement; this is actually the first time Trump has chosen to go as president. As Emily Davies, Isaac Arnsdorf, Jeremy Roebuck, and Joe Heim of the Washington Post reported today, the Trump administration could have provided a higher level of security last night as it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials, but it did not designate the dinner as a “National Special Security Event.” Even so, Secret Service agents did indeed stop Cole before he could enter the ballroom.
Yesterday, David A. Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater, and Andrea Fuller of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration has secretly awarded the company it chose to build the ballroom a no-bid $17.4 million contract to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park near the White House. In 2022 the Biden administration estimated the cost of the work to be $3.3 million. The journalists explain that the Trump administration dramatically increased the estimated cost by adding an additional 27% for inflation and then adding another inflation estimate of 24%, then increased its estimate by another 50% because it wanted to get the fountains fixed quickly, then simply gave the contract to Maryland-based Clark Construction.
While Trump claims the ballroom will be paid for by private donations, the government will pay for the fountain repairs. This means the contract should have been open for competitive bidding. To justify awarding the contract without that process, the journalists report, the administration cited an “urgency” exception to normal procedures meant for war or natural disasters.
The focus on last night’s event has obscured this upcoming week’s big story.
Trump has justified his refusal to seek congressional approval for his attack on Iran by claiming Iran posed an “imminent threat” to the U.S. While Trump’s own intelligence agencies contradicted that claim, it enabled Republicans to argue that Trump had authority to launch the strikes under the 1973 War Powers Act, which allows the president to act to counter an “imminent” threat.
But the War Powers Act says the president must notify Congress of any such action within 48 hours of its start. Then, by 60 days after that notification, the president has to stop using the military for that action unless the Congress either declares war or authorizes the use of the military for that specific action. Democrats have fought hard against Trump’s unilateral decision to go to war, but Republicans have refused to press him to get congressional approval, apparently hoping that Trump would find a way out of the Middle East crisis before hitting the 60-day mark.
But so far he has not, and the 60-day window closes on May 1.
Trump appears to believe the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports will hurt the country so badly that Iranian leaders will have to agree to his demands. But that pressure will take time to build. “I have all the time in the World, but Iran doesn’t,” he posted Thursday. He told reporters: “Don’t rush me. Don’t rush me…. So we were in Vietnam, like, for 18 years; we were in Iraq for many, many years.… I don’t like to say World War II, because that was a biggie, but we were four and a half, almost five years in World War II. And we were in the Korean war for seven years. I’ve been doing this for six weeks.”
If Trump doesn’t find an end to the conflict, Republicans must either vote to authorize what is already a deeply unpopular war or let Trump continue his war without congressional approval, adding fuel to accusations that he is becoming a dictator. After all, Trump claimed in January, after he had attacked Venezuela without congressional approval, that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional and would “take away our Powers to fight and defend the United States of America.”
The idea that the president can use the military as he wishes without authority from Congress demolishes one of the fundamental principles of our democracy: that we have a right to a say in how our lives and treasure are spent.
Rather than enabling Trump, Republicans could reassert the authority the Framers of the Constitution put in Congress’s hands and stop his deadly blundering.
“We’ve heard a lot of talk from Republicans that they’ll give this president 60 days,” the second-ranking Democrat in the House, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, told Mike Lillis of The Hill. “And this is a failed effort. And it’s long past time that he come to Congress and explain what the strategy is and what the exit is. Republicans have been saying that is a crucial timeline for them. So put your vote up on the board.”
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
Virginia voters yesterday agreed to a constitutional amendment that would temporarily redistrict the state if any other state redistricted for partisan reasons: that is, in retaliation for the partisan redistricting President Donald J. Trump launched in Texas in 2025 in an effort to retain control of the House of Representatives.
As Matt Cohen of Democracy Docket noted, Trump supporters immediately insisted the voting was rigged, probably through mail-in ballots. Trump himself took to social media to attack the election, repeating charges of rigging and then adding: “In addition to everything else, the language on the Referendum was purposefully unintelligible and deceptive. As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum, and neither do they! Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”
In fact, Trump himself began this mid-decade partisan gerrymander race with his pressure on Texas to rejigger its maps to give Republicans more House seats. That prompted California to retaliate with its own temporary redistricting to offset the new Texas Republican-leaning seats. Other states followed suit. Republicans redistricted Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, in addition to Texas, and expect those mid-decade redistricts will net them nine more seats. Democrats think their redistricting of California, along with a court-ordered redistricting of Utah, will get them an additional six seats. They are hoping that the temporary redistricting of Virginia will give them four more seats.
State lawmakers in Florida will convene a special session next week to consider redistricting that state, as well, to benefit the Republicans.
Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that the Republicans have full control of the federal government and could pass a law to ban partisan gerrymandering any time they want to, as Democrats have called for, but they refuse. “Republicans aren’t mad gerrymandering exists,” Cohen notes; “they’re mad that they’re not the only ones using it.”
The Republican National Committee, now controlled by Trump, immediately sued over the Virginia election, and a Virginia judge ruled that both the constitutional amendment and the referendum voters approved were invalid. He said that “any and all votes for or against the proposed constitutional amendment in the April 21, 2026 special election are ineffective,” and prevented officials from certifying the results.
But, as Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket wrote, Virginia attorney general Jay Jones is challenging the decision, saying: “Virginia voters have spoken, and an activist judge should not have the power over the People’s vote. We look forward to defending the outcome of last night’s election in court.”
Complaints about the Democratic push for a partisan gerrymander in Virginia have exposed a tendency to excuse Republican machinations to control politics while jumping on Democrats for similar behavior.
In August 2025, when Texas Republicans began this fight by redistricting their state after a brutal contest that drove Democratic legislators to leave the state and take refuge in Illinois and Massachusetts to deny Republicans enough legislators to pass a redistricting law, the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote: “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.” “Even if Texas’s move triggers an arms race, the trend will not put American democracy on life support,” it said, dismissing the concerns of those fighting the Republicans’ attempt to game the 2026 elections.
But with last night’s Democratic partisan gerrymander—one that, unlike the Texas gerrymander, went before the people for a vote—the Editorial Board changed its tune. It called this redistricting plan “a power grab by Democrats.” “They’re right that the [Republicans] started this fight by trying to pick up five House seats in Texas through gerrymandering, but they can spare us the false sanctimony about democratic norms going forward,” board members wrote.
Their argument appears to be that the Democrats stand a good chance of winning the midterms even if the Republicans have gamed the system, so the Democrats should not push back. “The news will embolden Republicans in Florida to forge ahead with their own gerrymandering…, continuing the race to the bottom,” they write, seeming to excuse the behavior of Republicans by blaming Democrats for it.
This pattern—expecting Republicans to behave wildly and cheat to grab power while expecting Democrats to behave according to the rules of normal times—has been going on now for years, and it is a dynamic that reflects the political patterns of the years before the Civil War. Then, Americans expected southern Democrats to bully and bluster and rig the system while northerners tried to jolly them into honoring the laws.
In the 1850s, southerners championed their region as the one that had correctly developed the society envisioned by the Founders. In the South a few very wealthy men controlled government and society, enslaving their neighbors. This system, its apologists asserted, was the highest form of human civilization. They opposed any attempt to restrict its spread. The South was superior to the North, enslavers insisted; it alone was patriotic, honored the Constitution, and understood economic growth. In the interests of union, northerners repeatedly ceded ground to enslavers and left their claim to superiority unchallenged.
Then, on May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death on the Senate floor shortly after a speech in which Sumner had called out those who were forcing enslavement on Kansas and insulted a relative of Brooks. Southern lawmakers and newspapermen alike cheered the violence against an elected representative in the Capitol. Lawmakers refused to expel Brooks, and one newspaper editor wrote: “We trust other gentlemen will follow the example of Mr. Brooks…. If need be, let us have a caning or cowhiding every day.”
But the attack on Sumner was a bridge too far for his colleague, Massachusetts representative Anson Burlingame. On June 21, he stood up in Congress to call out as inferior Brooks and the system of enslavement he defended. Burlingame was sick and tired of buying peace by letting southerners abuse the North. Enough, he said, was enough.
Enslavement was not a superior system, he said; it had dragged the nation backward. Slavery kept workers ignorant and godless while the northern system of freedom lifted workers up with schools and churches. Slavery feared innovation; freedom encouraged workers to try new ideas. Slavery kept the South mired in the past; freedom welcomed the modern world and pushed Americans into a new, thriving economy. And finally, when Sumner had spoken up against the tyranny of slavery, a southerner had clubbed him almost to death on the floor of the Senate.
Was ignorance, economic stagnation, and violence the true American system? For his part, Burlingame preferred to throw his lot with the North, which he said was superior to the South in its morality, education, economy, loyalty to the government, and fidelity to the Constitution. Northerners were willing to defend their system, he said, with guns if necessary.
Burlingame’s “Defense of Massachusetts” speech marked the first time a prominent northerner had offered to fight to defend the northern way of life. Previously, southerners had been the ones threatening war and demanding concessions from the North to preserve the peace. Burlingame explained that he was willing to accept a battle because what was at stake was the future of the nation.
Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southern leaders by calling them out for trying to destroy democracy. Northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call, and to the new Republican Party he was helping to build, because he had shown it would stand up for their rights.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) echoed Burlingame today when a reporter asked what she thought of complaints about the Virginia vote. “Oh, wah, wah, wah,” she laughed. “Listen. Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set….
“What they’re just mad at is that they have been accustomed to a Democratic Party that rolls over, doesn’t fight, and takes everything sitting down. And what they’re mad at right now is that we are here in a new day. And we have been asking the Democratic Party to stand up and fight, and now they did, and now the Republican Party doesn’t like the fact that they are fighting against someone who actually will stand up for the American people.
“So if Republicans decide that they would like to revisit a ban on…partisan gerrymandering, I welcome them. We have the bill right here to end this all today. But they don’t want to because they like pursuing and continuing to enact an unfair electoral landscape. And so we have an obligation to defend ourselves.”
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
