A bittersweet show is planned for tonight’s KINGSTON COFFEE HOUSE. We’ll listen to music by Todd Snider, the much-loved Folk artist who tragically passed this week. There’ll also be more cheerful stuff from Bert Jansch’s classic “LA Turnaround”, the lovely Leyla McCalla, John Hartford, birthday-boy Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young, and selections from Dion DiMucci’s unheralded folkrock classic “Kickin’ Child.”
PLAYLIST
OPEN: Coffee Time
Mississippi John Hurt “Coffee Blues” (Live)
Dion “Spoonful” (The Road I’m On: A Retrospective) 1997
Dion “Farewell” (m.Trad / l.Dylan) Kickin’ Child 1967
BROKEN HEARTS AND DIRTY WINDOWS
Todd Snider “Beer Run” (Near Truths and Hotel Rooms Live, 2003)
Todd Snider “Conservative Christian, Right Wing Republican, Straight White Male” (East Nashville Skyline, 2004)
Todd Snider “I Can’t Complain” (Near Truths and Hotel Rooms Live, 2003)
Todd Snider “John Prine” (Near Truths and Hotel Rooms Live, 2003)
John Prine “Souvenirs”
Franz Casseus “Lullaby” (Haitian Dances, 1954)
WISH YOU WERE HERE
Leyla McCalla “Money Is King” (Neville Marcano) The Capitalist Blues, 2014
Leyla McCalla “Little Sparrow” (A Day For Hunting, A Day for Prey, 2004)
Dom La Nena & Rosemary Stanley “Wish You Were Here” (Waters/Gilmour) Ramages, 2020
Neil Young “Til the Morning Comes (After the Gold Rush)
Tunde Adebimpe Unknown Legend” (N. Young) from Rachel Getting Married, Johnathan Demme, 2008
Lukas Nelson & Sierra Ferrell “Unknown Legend” (single, 2025)
MORE LOVE • Tim O’Brien “More Love” (J. Hartford) A Tribute to J.Hartford: Live From Mountain Stage, 2001 • Tim O’Brien & Kathy Mattea “Gentle on My Mind” (J. Hartford) • John Hartford “Presbyterian Guitar” Aere-o Plain, 1971 • Sam Robbins “Rosie” So Much I Still Don’t See, 2025
BERT, MONKEE MIKE & SUSAN COWSILL
Bert Jansch “Fresh As a Sweet Sunday Morning” (L.A. Turnaround,1974)
Bert Jansch “Needle of Death” (L.A. Turnaround, 1974)
AJ Lee & Blue Summit “I’m a Believer” (N. Diamond)
The Cowsills “Thinking of You” (Cocaine Drain, 2025)
The Continental Drifters “Meet on the Ledge” (R.Thompson) Drifted in the Beginning and the End, 2015
Fairport Convention “End of a Holiday” (R.Thompson) What We Did on Our Holiday, 1969
KICKIN’ CHILD • Dion “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” (Dylan) Kickin’ Child: The Lost Album 1965 • Dion “Time In My Heart For You” (D. Dimucci) Kickin’ Child: The Lost Album 1965. • Dion “I’m In the Mood for You” Kickin’ Child: The Lost Album 1965. • Dion “Abraham, Martin and John” (Dick Holler) Dion, 1968
Selections from RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, 2008
Zafer Tawil “Wedding Waltz”
Zafer Tawil “Kym’s Homecoming”
Robyn Hitchcock “America”
OH, MY GORD • Gordon Lightfoot “Early Morning Rain” Gord’s Gold, 1975 • Gordon Lightfoot “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” Summertime Dream, 1976 • Connie Caldor “If You Could Read My Mind” Beautiful: A Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot, 2003
BLUES RUN THE GAME: Paul Simon in London 1963–1965 • The Secret Sisters “Kathy’s Song” You Don’t Own Me Any More 2017 • Jackson C. Frank “Blues Run the Game” (1965)
As the folk icon celebrates his 84th birthday, he looks back on falling out with Paul Simon, smashing up pianos with Dylan – and the classic song he’s still not got quite right
By Robin Denselow
Martin Carthy has returned to Scarborough Fair. It’s been 60 years since he first recorded the song on his self-titled debut album, and famously taught it (or tried to teach it) to both Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, when they came to watch the young guitar hero playing in the London folk clubs. Dylan transformed the song into Girl from the North Country, while Simon turned it into Scarborough Fair/Canticle, a hit single for Simon & Garfunkel and the opening track on their 1966 album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.
Carthy’s new version is on Transform Me Then into a Fish, his first solo album in 21 years, released on his 84th birthday today. It now has sitar backing from Sheema Mukherjee, giving it a mysterious, spooky edge. “That’s the kind of a song it is. Try not to be scared of it,” said Carthy, whose sleeve notes when he first recorded the song provided a reminder that parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme were herbs traditionally associated with death. “It finds a home among the weird, oddball songs. I was interested in what Sheema could do with it, and she responded as a wonderful musician will respond …”
He is sitting at his kitchen table in the house in which he has lived for the past 37 years, in Robin Hood’s Bay on the Yorkshire coast, just half an hour’s drive north of Scarborough. It looks like an over-cluttered museum, with every space on the floor, walls or shelves packed with musical instruments, cassettes, pictures, posters and a street sign from Hull, where his wife, the late Norma Waterson, grew up. He now shares the home with their daughter, the folksinger and fiddle-player Eliza Carthy, her two children, and a cat.
‘I found myself looking into Dylan’s face’ … Martin Carthy performing at the King & Queen, Foley Street.
Photograph: Brian Shuel/Redferns
He says he has always loved the lyrics of folk songs as much as the melodies, and as he discusses the new album, he delights in telling stories, often illustrated with bursts of song, about the bands and musicians he has played with. Eliza brings in tea, chipping in about lyrics and song titles.
The new album started out as a 60thanniversary tribute to his 1965 solo debut, but didn’t quite work out that way. A handful of songs have been dropped, and three new ones added. But eight originals remain, including Scarborough Fair.
He remembers exactly where he first heard it – at the Troubadour folk club in Earl’s Court, in 1960, where it was sung by Jacqueline McDonald (of the Spinners fame) who told her audience that she had learned it from a new song book, The Singing Island, by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. Carthy rushed out to buy it and thought: “That’s a nice tune – and of course it was, because Ewan wrote [this version of] it! He would always improve a tune.”
Carthy composed his own arrangement for the song, and was singing it while playing with the Thamesiders at the King & Queen pub, near Goodge Street, when he “found myself looking into Dylan’s face – I had heard about him from Sing Out magazine”. Dylan was there with his legendary manager Albert Grossman, “a folk fan who loved fishing and whaling songs and could sing the pants off anyone, though he never sang in public”.
Dylan said he loved Scarborough Fair, and begged Carthy to “teach me that, teach me that”. A few days later he came to watch Carthy playing solo at the Troubadour, and began visiting the house where he was living on Haverstock Hill, near Belsize Park tube.
The first visit has become a folk legend. It was during the bitterly cold winter of 1962-3, and one of Carthy’s friends had found an old piano abandoned outside Chalk Farm tube and pushed it up the hill to the house. Carthy started chopping it up with a sword he had been given as a Christmas present, so he could feed it into a wood-burning stove – to Dylan’s fury. “I got the sword and Bob came and stood in front of me and said ‘you can’t do that, man, it’s a musical instrument!’ ‘It’s a piece of junk’, I said, and swung a couple of times. Bob was looking up at me and said ‘could I try?’ – and he battered it … it’s all true!”
Dylan failed to master Scarborough Fair. “He wanted to do it with a flat pick though he’s a perfectly good finger-style player,” says Carthy. “He got the giggles all the time and it made him laugh.” So when Dylan later transformed the song into Girl from the North Country, did he mind? “We just swapped songs all the time,” says Carthy. “That’s what people did.”
Carthy was less pleased when Paul Simon did not credit him for his arrangement on Simon and Garfunkel’s version, Scarborough Fair/Canticle. But all is now forgiven, with Carthy saying: “It was grossly unfair [of me] because it wasn’t a pinch in any way … it was written as a tribute because he is clever enough to do that.’” They made up by singing the song together on stage at Hammersmith Apollo in October 2000: “He was doing a tour. He said, ‘Really – you want to do that?’ It was important, so I could lay it to rest and never have to sing that song again!”
He eventually changed his mind about returning to the song, he said, because “I was gifted a lovely version!” In 2014 he was invited to sing on a TV drama, Remember Me, set in Scarborough and starring Michael Palin. When he went to the recording, he was presented with a very different version of Scarborough Fair, “collected by Cecil Sharpe, from Goathland – a village near here on the moors”. That’s the one he recorded for the new album and now sings live “but I haven’t got it quite right yet …”
Other songs of course have stories attached, too. He tells how he sang High Germany back in 1963 and thought he had remembered the words correctly until he checked the English Folk Music Journal and found that for some verses “the words were nothing like mine – I was highly impressed I had invented this stuff”. He still sings his version. As for his own original version of the Ewan MacColl song Springhill Mine Disaster, The Ballad of Springhill, he says that MacColl, a folk purist, “hated what I did, because I was playing guitar – a foreign body!” On the new version, Carthy is backed only by Eliza’s fiddle and demonstrates his new singing voice. “I lost a lot in the lower registers and found something else – and I like it.”
Eliza’s fiddle also provides the new setting for Ye Mariners All, “one of those lovely nonsense songs.” The suitably surreal album cover for Transform Me Then into a Fish shows Martin at the breakfast table in the middle of the ocean, holding his fork like a crazed Neptune.
Carthy has always been adventurous. After recording that landmark album in 1965 he worked with fiddler Dave Swarbrick. When Swarbrick joined Fairport Convention in 1969 – an invitation also extended to Carthy, “twice!” – Carthy joined Steeleye Span instead, playing electric guitar, very loudly, saying “do you want me to turn it down to ‘lounge’ – it’s supposed to be loud!”
‘I thought eventually someone would teach me to sing, and Norma did’ … l to r, Carthy, Norma Waterson, Lal Waterson, Mike Waterson. Photograph: Estate of Keith Morris/Redferns
After marrying Norma in 1972 he joined the glorious vocal group the Watersons. “I thought eventually someone would teach me to sing, and Norma did,” he says. He went on to be involved in many different projects, including solo work, playing in duos with Swarbrick and with John Kirkpatrick and Eliza, and in groups including Waterson: Carthy (in which he was joined by Norma and Eliza), the brass-backed Brass Monkey, and the gloriously experimental the Imagined Village, which reworked traditional songs for a multicultural Britain, and featured a large cast that included Simon Emmerson, Billy Bragg, Benjamin Zephaniah and Mukherjee.
“I loved it,” says Carthy. “That huge band was so exciting. Sheema seized everything we tossed at her and she encouraged me to take risks.” With the Imagined Village, he recorded a powerful new treatment of the traditional My Son John in 2010, with sitar backing and updated to the Afghan war era with Carthy’s new lyrics: “Up come John and he’s got no legs, he’s got carbon fibre blades instead.” He startled his followers even more by re-working Slade’s Cum on Feel the Noize: “Because I’m a big fan of Noddy [Holder]. What a singer!”
He’s just home from a US tour with Eliza, with shows to celebrate the new album involving both Eliza and Sheema starting on 12 June – while next year promises the return of a new version of the Imagined Village. Carthy may be 84, but he’s not slowing down.
Bert Jansch is the best guitarist you’ve never heard of. His influence on Jimmy Page, Paul Simon and Neil Young was profound.
By Mark Daponte
The guitarist Bert Jansch influenced many a musician but, like many artists before him, never got his due — especially in the money department. He had an impact on Paul Simon, Donovan, Neil Young, and Jimmy Page. The Smiths’ Johnny Marr gushed, “He innovated acoustic music in the same way that Jimi Hendrix innovated electric music.” Neil Young concurred, stating Jansch was “Jimi Hendrix on the acoustic guitar.” But like Hendrix, Jansch had some bad habits, in his case, alcohol.
In 1987, Jansch’s pancreas inflamed so badly that he couldn’t stand up. He recalled, “It was like being sick without being sick.” He was rushed to a hospital where a doctor told him he almost died and demanded that he stop drinking. In a 2007 interview he gave to a blog called Alternatives to Valium, Bert said: “I had this nurse who was a fan, who came in and sat on the bed. She tried to give me reasons why I should give up drinking.”
The guitarist Bert Jansch influenced many a musician but, like many artists before him, never got his due — especially in the money department. He had an impact on Paul Simon, Donovan, Neil Young, and Jimmy Page. The Smiths’ Johnny Marr gushed, “He innovated acoustic music in the same way that Jimi Hendrix innovated electric music.” Neil Young concurred, stating Jansch was “Jimi Hendrix on the acoustic guitar.” But like Hendrix, Jansch had some bad habits, in his case, alcohol.
In 1987, Jansch’s pancreas inflamed so badly that he couldn’t stand up. He recalled, “It was like being sick without being sick.” He was rushed to a hospital where a doctor told him he almost died and demanded that he stop drinking. In a 2007 interview he gave to a blog called Alternatives to Valium, Bert said: “I had this nurse who was a fan, who came in and sat on the bed. She tried to give me reasons why I should give up drinking.”
The Scotsman may have been drinking so heavily due to the many times he was fleeced by fellow guitarists. Jimmy Page borrowed the melody of Jansch’s “Blackwaterside” and turned it into “Black Mountain Side.” Page then claimed he wrote the song that appeared on Zeppelin’s debut album.
Once unaware of Page’s plagiarizing, Bert remembered, “One day I was in the States and somebody said have you heard this track? Page did the same thing with [guitarist] Davey [Graham]. ‘White Summer’ [a tune from the Yardbirds’ last album, Little Games] is lifted from Davey’s arrangement of “She Moved Thro’ The Fair.”
Transatlantic, Jansch’s record company, launched a lawsuit against the guitarist but didn’t have enough money to combat Page’s team of lawyers. When Jansch later crossed paths with Page, Bert gibed, “He runs away. He could be friendlier.”
Neil Young listed Jansch as an influence on the back of the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again. He admitted borrowing liberally from Bert, telling his biographer: “I always feel bad I stole the melody [to ‘Ambulance Blues’] from Bert Jansch. You ever heard that song ‘Needle of Death?’ I loved that melody. I didn’t realize ‘Ambulance Blues’ starts exactly the same. I knew that it sounded like something that he did, but when I went back and heard that record again I realized I copped his thing. I felt really bad about that. I’ll never play guitar as good as this guy. Never.”
Donovan found out that Bert could play the field even better than he could play guitar. Unfortunately, Bert believed that Donovan should have stuck to making hits instead of hitting on his then-girlfriend, singer Beverly Kutner. Donovan stated in a 2011 interview with Mojo magazine: “I was part of the triangle, although not in the way Bert thought I was. I wrote [1967’s] ‘Bert’s Blues’ because I felt bad, as I loved Bert.”
The next year, Beverly got into the name-checking game herself by appearing on Simon and Garfunkel’s “Faking It” song and cheerily saying Donovan’s last name: “Good morning, Mr. Leitch. Have you had a busy day?”
Being a musicians’ musician never translated into popularity for Bert or his band, Pentangle; their blend of jazz, folk, blues, and classical music never achieved mass appeal. The record-buying public adored songs and groups featuring dueling electric guitars (i.e, the Stones) behind a male lead singer. Two acoustic guitarists, Bert and John Renbourn, backing the fabulous Jacqui McShee never caught the ears of millions, a fact the easy-going-to-a-fault Bert shrugged off.
His attitude about suing Jimmy Page is like the Zeppelin song, “Hey, Hey, What Can I Do?” Bert noted: “I’m quite happy. I don’t have to borrow guitars anymore. What am I going to do with three Rolls-Royces?”
Jansch never begrudged the vast success of his peers which included Paul Simon. In the early ‘60’s, the pair played at London folk clubs. Bert recalled in 2011: “We used to do gigs together, around London. He has moved on, you might say. I’ve not heard from him since.” But Bert heard when Simon recorded “Anji” which was an instrumental piece at the conclusion of side one on Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sounds of Silence album. Simon thought it was Bert’s song and the writing credit initially went to him but was later changed to folkie guitar hero Davey Graham who Jansch idolized.
On a 2011 appearance on NPR’s World Café, Paul Simon fondly recalled Bert who had recently died that year at the age of 67. “He had a real interesting way of pulling of the strings and slapping and pushing of his guitar and his persona was a little bit wild. I know he had severe arthritis and he had a lot of issues with alcohol but he was a beloved guy.”
Bert Jansch is the best guitarist you’ve never heard of. His influence on Jimmy Page, Paul Simon and Neil Young was profound.
The guitarist Bert Jansch influenced many a musician but, like many artists before him, never got his due — especially in the money department. He had an impact on Paul Simon, Donovan, Neil Young, and Jimmy Page. The Smiths’ Johnny Marr gushed, “He innovated acoustic music in the same way that Jimi Hendrix innovated electric music.” Neil Young concurred, stating Jansch was “Jimi Hendrix on the acoustic guitar.” But like Hendrix, Jansch had some bad habits, in his case, alcohol.
In 1987, Jansch’s pancreas inflamed so badly that he couldn’t stand up. He recalled, “It was like being sick without being sick.” He was rushed to a hospital where a doctor told him he almost died and demanded that he stop drinking. In a 2007 interview he gave to a blog called Alternatives to Valium, Bert said: “I had this nurse who was a fan, who came in and sat on the bed. She tried to give me reasons why I should give up drinking.”
The Scotsman may have been drinking so heavily due to the many times he was fleeced by fellow guitarists. Jimmy Page borrowed the melody of Jansch’s “Blackwaterside” and turned it into “Black Mountain Side.” Page then claimed he wrote the song that appeared on Zeppelin’s debut album.