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it made a lot of sense why she would be that way. It has a little waltz that goes into another waltz and then the tempo changes. I don’t see why songs should be consistent in terms of time. I’m really proud of it.”
“I
Some – including his friend and Sheffield neighbour Richard Hawley – have been trying to convince him to make an album entire- ly of his own material but he insists there is too much other stuff he wants to do. Like Jackson C Frank’s signature song, Blues Run The Game. Many before him have been drawn to the song that encapsu- lates the pain and desperation of Frank’s bruised and tortured life, most famously Bert Jansch, but Simpson had no reservations about approaching it anew.
“I like the idea of doing something Bert did. Songs need to be
revisited and reinvented. I don’t subscribe to the idea you shouldn’t do something because somebody else did it well and I had a lot of fun with it. It took a long time because it is technically tricksy – it took me several months.”
He’s always been fascinated by the back stories of songs, so
Frank’s tragic life is highly pertinent. Badly scarred physically and mentally in a school fire at eleven, he was awarded $100,000 insur- ance money at 21, which he reputedly spent on “travel, Martin gui- tars and booze, but not necessarily in that order”. He tried his luck in England, becoming Sandy Denny’s boyfriend and with Paul Simon producing his only album (he was so self-conscious he reputedly hid behind screens while recording it) in 1965 before returning to the States to oblivion, homelessness, mental institutions, a shooting resulting in blindness in one eye, terrible sick ness and, eventually, a lonely death in 1999.
“He was a massively uncomfortable human being. His album did
really badly, it did nothing but influence Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and people like me.”
Then there’s John Hardy. Hardy’s gruesome saga of violence, murder and execution has long been a magnet for folk and blues artists and was revisited by Simpson in company with former Caroli- na Chocolate Drop Dom Flemons when they toured and recorded together last year. This led to Simpson writing another John Hardy song, Thomas Drew.
“I write when I come up against something that I want to say, something that nobody else has come up with. So I was looking for something new to say about John Hardy and found a contemporary newspaper report about his crime, trial and execution in West Vir- ginia, which was so utterly grim. This was 1894. He was shooting craps with a guy who won 25 cents off him so he shot him and killed him. He was tried and found guilty and on the day of his execution they baptised him and he repented and said ‘it was the whisky what made me do it.’”
“They hanged him in front of 3,000 people. They say he was a desperate little man, but there’s a picture of him on the gallows and he was a giant. The trap dropped and he fell, but it failed to break his neck and he took seventeen minutes to die. In front of 3,000 people. It made me want to draw a picture of the inhumanity. But the other thing that struck me also was that we all know about the John Hardys of this world, but I never knew the name of the man he killed, which is Thomas Drew. So Thomas Drew has his own song now.”
On those shows with Dom Flemons he also played St James Hos-
pital, which neatly segued into Flemons playing the perhaps more famous Americanised version, St James Infirmary.
“That came from a really interesting project Topic did called Matching Ballads with Hedy West doing the American versions and Ian Manuel doing the British versions of various ballads. The original version is about a man dying of syphilis; in the States they mostly changed it to a man dying after a gambling fight.”
Did he have fun touring with Dom Flemons? “Oh yes, it was great fun. It was an EFDSS project that came completely out of the
t’s very dark. It’s not happy. It’s me trying to under- stand about my mother to figure out what she was and why she was. She wasn’t an easy person. She was extraordinarily bitter. But having read these letters back and forth between her and her father,
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