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the couple’s garden, and in his designs for a man-powered flying machine.
An intensely private man, distrustful of interviewers, Bert’s Pentangle tour correspon dence (“he wrote almost every day, short, spidery, plaintive love notes, full of spelling mistakes, on thin blue airmail paper,”) make for fascinating and often poignant reading (“all we seem to have done is drink since we got here… I wish my letter writing was better, seems all wrong to me…”), while a letter from Gill Cook (mother of Bert’s first child) includes: “I wish I knew what you were thinking…”
Bert Jansch: Living With The Legend
Heather Jansch The Olchard Press (ISBN 978-0-9562252-1-4)
Heather and Bert Jansch were married in October 1968 and though separated in Jan- uary 1975, remained friends, not divorcing until 1988. Bert subsequently married Loren Auerbach and enjoyed something of a career revival before both his and Loren’s untimely deaths in 2011. Heather, meanwhile, estab- lished herself as a sculptor of astonishing skill – in the words of Eden Project founder Tim Smit: “a genius... rightly considered one of our country's finest artists.”
Living With The Legend began life as a response to press requests following Bert’s death, and to “the onslaught of email condo- lences from many distraught fans who assumed us still to be married. It was obvious that some sort of public statement was need- ed. Writing it released a torrent of memories; our days together came flooding back to me. Three weeks later at his funeral, meeting people from our past triggered even more recollections. It became apparent that there was a need for a book that would tell some- thing of the man, the very private man, behind the music who was propelled to a life he never sought.”
The book is itself an objet d’art, printed on high-grade paper and spiral bound in board covers, comparable with the widely- acclaimed Lal Waterson portrait, Teach Me To Be A Summer’s Morning. Heather’s album cover illustrations and photographs share space with Bert’s hand-notated musical com- positions and typed lyrics. A fascination with birds and flight (so memorably essayed on the Avocet album) is revealed in Bert’s own drawings of birds, the dovecot he made for
Bert Jansch
Bert’s desire to escape the limelight led the couple to move home twice – from London (where a spurned Roy Harper staged a sit-in protest on the doorstep!) to Sussex (“not much furniture, but we did have several guitars, a banjo and their cases, and not much room”) to their final home together in a remote farm in Wales (“Bert having rejected the idea of Corn- wall as he was too well known there and would never get any peace”).
Conversely, Bert also emerges as “very sociable with those he knew well,” as Heather recounts joyous times with numerous visitors from Bert’s circle of contemporaries including Danny Thompson, Jake Walton, John Bidwell and Clive Palmer (“if you asked me to name the musicians Bert held in highest esteem it would include him, along with Davy Graham, Anne Briggs and Wizz Jones”).
The cover photograph shows a smiling, recently married Bert and Heather, taken by Hans Feurer during the Birthday Blues album cover sessions (more photos from the session are reproduced throughout the book). It is this Bert Jansch – the bashful, unaffected genius who somehow looked effortlessly cool whilst cuddling a retriever puppy, who is evoked most memorably in this personal memoir. Never intended as a complete or definitive Bert biography (in conversation, Heather opined that Colin Harper has already covered that “brilliantly” with Dazzling Stranger), Liv- ing With The Legend is as lovely to behold as one could hope for, and the author’s writing is both eloquent and gracious.
“I hope his fans enjoy it and find it a fit- ting tribute,” says the artist formerly known as Miss Heather Rosemary Sewell. She has exceeded that modest ambition by some con- siderable distance.
£1 from the sale of every book will go to Macmillan Cancer Support.
www.heatherjansch.com Steve Hunt
Bluegrass Bluesman: Josh Graves, A Memoir
Fred Bartenstein (ed) University of Illinois Press (ISBN 978-0-252-07864-4) $21.95 (pb)
Born in southeastern Tennessee, Burkett Howard Graves (1927-2006) – known to friends and contemporaries as ‘Uncle Josh’ – joined Flatt & Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys in 1955. Already recognised as an exceptional dobro player for his work in bands led by popular mid-century country acts Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper and Mac Wiseman, he would go on to define bluegrass dobro after Earl Scruggs taught him how to use a banjo- like three-finger roll on resonator guitar. Graves took it from there. Only Beecher Kirby (‘Bashful Brother Oswald’ in Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys) and Jerry Douglas (currently in Alison Krauss’s Union Station), each with his own distinctive style, could boast comparable fame and influence on the instrument.
Bluegrass Bluesman gets its title from
Graves’s affinity for blues from early child- hood encounters with rural black guitarists to adult friendships with the likes of Lightnin’ Hopkins. (Given his background and limited education, Graves was admirably free of the racial prejudice of most of his white Southern contemporaries.) The book’s core consists of 88 pages of Graves’s transcribed and edited oral reminisces, along with a concluding chapter of appreciations from his fellows (Douglas, Wiseman, Mike Auldridge, Marty Stuart, and more) plus front matter, a photo section, and an index.
Even at its modest length, Bluegrass
Bluesman, less a history than a field report, makes for solid value if you’re drawn to blue- grass and curious about those who created it. A first-class raconteur with a back-country accent and an easy-going sense of humour, Graves recreates a lost world and the vivid personalities who lived in it. With particular delight he recalls the stars who, taking umbrage from slights real or imagined, would refuse to speak with one another for years thereafter.
What matters, of course, is that in his years with the Foggy Mountain Boys, Graves helped fashion a sound which has yet to lose its power to astound. It’s nice to know that a good man had a hand in all that great music. Beyond that, Bluegrass Bluesman is an endear- ing autobiography of a man who left an enduring musical legacy and had fun doing it.
www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/ 52rnx6xt9780252078644.html
Jerome Clark
All The Wrong Notes: Adventures In Unpopular Music
Dave Hadfield Scratching Shed Publishing (ISBN-13: 978-0957559363). Paperback.
Northern journalist Dave Hadfield might be better known to those of a sporting bent – alien territory to me – as the rugby league correspondent of the Independent. But apart from that he and I have a number of things in common. We both started off on the UK folk scene in time to witness the mid 1960s upris- ing, we both seem to have similarly eclectic tastes that often coincide, and we both sur- vived going out for a curry with Ewan Mac- Coll (though Hadfield’s experience seems to have been a much better one than mine).
What he does in All The Wrong Notes is give a pretty good snapshot of the evolution of our area of uneasy listening and the places it was made over the intervening years, using his own life and experiences as a skeleton on which to hang the story and go off at all sorts
Photo: Dave Peabody
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