f40
union and making people feel proud the way Woody [Guthrie] did is an act of poetry. So when I find people like that I am drawn to write about them. I want to show what it is in them that has inspired me or given me the confidence to pursue a particular road. What Rev Gary Davis had to overcome was unbelievable. Blindness and playing on the streets. With that song I’m trying to marry the beautiful guitar style of Rev Davis with his deeply felt and sincere religious belief, a parable about the faith of a blind man carrying a gun to protect himself from thieves who want to steal his guitar and a few coins. Country Joe [McDonald] said he was staying with Rev Davis one time and when he walked in the room, Rev Davis pulled a gun on him. Joe said ‘Don’t shoot Reverend Davis, it’s me, Joe!’ Afterwards Joe said to him ‘How would you have aimed your gun?’ and Rev Davis said ‘The Lord will guide my hand…’”
Around 1963 or ’64, Ralph appeared at the Bexhill Blues Festi- val in front of eight people in deck chairs (“and four of them were asleep”). Afterwards the promoter said he hadn’t made enough money to pay Ralph but insisted on giving him a present in lieu of payment – Robert Johnson’s King Of The Delta Blues Singers LP on Columbia.
“I had a little Dansette and put it on and from the moment the guitar came in the hairs on my arm stood up. Until then I was into Blind Boy Fuller and all that raggy stuff but this was some- thing else. I’ve still got that album. For me he was the greatest blues poet of all time. You can’t find another guitar player like Robert or another blues poet like Robert. Leroy Carr is probably the nearest but he’s very urbane and sophisticated. I imagine Robert didn’t have much of an education and his demons are per- sonified as hellhounds and his need for sexual comfort is both playful and dark – he’s young and his hormones are going mad.”
R
“When I play Robert Johnson in my car, which I do frequently, and pull up to my house, I can’t turn off the engine until he’s stopped singing. I have to pay him that respect. Guitar and voice are seamless. His voice mimics his guitar and guitar mimics voice. It might be seen as unsophisticated but when Eric Clapton recorded his Robert Johnson dedication album I wish he hadn’t bothered. It just sounded like a pub band.”
alph stops short of agreeing with my suggestion that his contribution is somehow undervalued by the mod- ern folk fraternity, but there is a sense that general perceptions about him are wrong. This may be, in no small part, due to the elephant in the room in any con-
versation with him ie that song. You know, the London song. Ralph has long resigned himself to never being able to appear on stage without performing the one about the streets and he’s grateful for the benefits it has brought; yet he’s understandably frustrated that despite a magnificent catalogue of around 350 often challenging and beautifully-crafted songs, he’ll always be defined by that one.
“It’s strange that despite all those years of anxiety and stress trying to get your poetry right, you are judged by something you did when you were 22 because it suggests that since then you have stopped still. The song is a monster. A friendly monster, but still a bloody monster. I’m actually quite glad I’m remembered for that one and not the song that kept me off the No 1 spot – Lonely This Christmas by Mud – so I have something to be thankful for.”
“See, I was always the boy most likely to make the crossover. When Nat Joseph signed me to Transatlantic he wanted strings on my first album and to take me to the middle ground. Rightly or wrongly, I’ve been fighting that ever since because I’m perceived in that way although I like to think I’ve chosen difficult topics to write about – racism, immigration, unions, drug addiction, alco- hol, alienation, emigration, all those things…but I do it my own way. I look at Billy Bragg – loud thrashing electric guitar, very little melody but slogans that penetrate and go in. More aggressive than Woody. Don’t get me wrong, I admire Billy but mine is a soft- er approach and it tends to be glossed over as more easy when it’s not really. I address a lot of uncomfortable things.”
He does, though, have another London song on the new
album – The London Apprentice – which even includes a reference to The Other Song. Mention of it triggers an entertaining reverie on the capital. “I’m from Croydon and I love being a Londoner. When people say ‘I don’t like London’ I say ‘Which bit don’t you like? Soho? Dagenham? Southfields?’ It’s so huge. Twice the popu- lation of Norway. I think of London as lots of little villages linked by the tube. The point is we never learn London, we are all apprentices. It’s been a refugee and it welcomes people from all different beliefs, cultures and religions, it still does. Sometimes when I get full of doubts one of the best cures I know is to get out
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108