Even so, the tracks here from his 1964 album with doyen Shirley Collins, Folk Roots, New Routes, are among his best. There’s no mistaking how effortlessly smooth his playing was, and while Graham never claimed to be much of a singer, one listen to his limp voice on Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright or his struggle with The Beatles’ Getting Better confirms why he mostly recorded instrumentals. Towards the end of the 60s (his first album, The Guitar Player, came out in 1963) his behaviour was eccentric at best, reflected in the music, rather like a folk Syd Barrett.īut that doesn’t mean he’s difficult. Never having an American recording contract didn’t help, but Graham was too eclectic for some, able to cross from jazz to folk to rock to raga to blues to ragtime in a heartbeat. What made Graham such an unknown giant? Well, the giant part is easy: although the jury is out on whether he actually invented it, Graham certainly popularised the DADGAD guitar tuning that became the default setting for any finger-picking guitarist plus he wrote Anji, his first ever composition, aged just 19, which went on to become a folk standard recorded by Simon & Garfunkel, Jansch and Chicken Shack, and performed by myriad others. ![]() This two-CD collection helps rectify the balance, cherry picking from the eight albums he recorded before or during 1970, by which time drugs had all but ended his career, after which he largely made a living teaching guitar. ![]() ![]() You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone, and when folk guitarist Davy Graham died in 2008, relatively unknown compared to the likes of Bert Jansch, Jimmy Page and Johnny Marr, who all owed him a debt of influence, it was too late for most.
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