Salut! Live

 John Renbourn at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2011. Image: Bryan Ledgard 

A chance exchange with an electronic acquaintance at Twitter prompted some thoughts on folk music (and allied forms) without voices, musicians who let their instruments do the talking.

The first examples of instrumental sounds that caught my admiring attention would have been the string of hits recorded by the Shadows; the chart-topping Apache, originally recorded by Bert Weedon whose version enjoyed more modest success, dates from 1960.

Image: Jef Aerosol

It has been a remarkable labour of love undertaken by a writer for whom Sandy Denny's voice "touches the soul" each time he hears it.

More than 40 years after Sandy's untimely death at 31, Mick Donovan set himself the task of digging out clips of 100 recordings from the outstanding body of work bequeathed by one of the finest singer-songwriters the world has seen. Each was accompanied by a brief description and they can all be found at the Sandy Denny and Family Facebook group.

For his finale - assuming he does not get the urge to resume at No 101, Mick has chosen, as you might expect, Sandy's much-covered classic Who Knows Where The Time Goes, a rather special version as he explains below. I have chosen to let Mick develop the story of what he did and why he did it ... the clip also appears below

Image: W W Thaler - H Weber, Hildesheim / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

Did I reach folk music via the blues or the other way round? I think it was the former; you'd go to folk clubs to hear people playing Dylan and the blues and then find yourself introduced to the traditional music of the British Isles and beyond. I was quickly hooked without losing affection for what had taken me into those smoke-filled, North-eastern pub function rooms in the first place.

Peter Green, the founder of Fleetwood Mac who has just died aged 73, was one of the musicians who inspired me back then.

I cannot overstate how important those British bluesmen were in the development of musical tastes that have remained with me for more than half a century.

Like Green, I grew up on conventional pop and rock - his own early inspiration was the Shadows' Hank Marvin - but came to find it unsatisfying.

Image: Judy Dynle in Oxfordshire, 2009 Credit: Wikipedia 'tommytomato'

Salut! Live is not a folk news site.

It can post reflections, reviews, lists, the odd interview and so on but it cannot hope to offer a rolling stream of updates about the music we love and the people who make it.

Sometimes, we are forced to look elsewhere for ways of recording significant events (a US friend of ours, Stan Wilson, for example on the death from Covid-19 of John Prine).

The rock musician Pete Sears now fills another gap. Judy Dyble, who has died aged 71, fully earns a place in these pages as the original lead singer of Fairport Convention.

It is perhaps fitting that I came across Pete's stirring tribute at a Facebook group devoted to Sandy Denny, the singer who replaced Judy when the latter - to use her owns words* - was 'unceremoniously dumped' before the release of Fairport's first album ... I shall now let Pete - whose retrospective consent is being sought, though I cannot imagine he'd mind - take up the story of the woman described in an excellent New York Times obituary as possessing a 'crystalline soprano voice' ...

As Salut! Live's little world knows full well, I adore Kate Rusby, her songwriting and singing and even the "natteriness" as she once described the garrulous ways she'd acquired from life as a Yorkshirewoman.

Interest to declare: I worked for her once - a short biography for her website, much improved since by others.

Out of the loop these days, I relied on my elder daughter Christelle, not a folkie at all but open to different sounds especially when selected by Jo Wiley for BBC Radio 2, for an alert to this enchanting version of the Bangles' hit Manic Monday, a home-made product of lockdown.

Please share a photo from a live concert or gig before lockdown. Our entire industry is facing a catastrophic loss of skills with up to 50% facing unemployment #LetTheMusicPlay 🙏🏻 pic.twitter.com/mFvEjy3hc4

— Cara Dillon (@CaraDillonSings) July 2, 2020

Lockdown is a time for forced jollity and virtual audience participation.  We're all being bombarded with demands to take part in nominating our favourite films, music, poetry and, for all I know, Brexit and Boris lies. It's usually friends asking which makes it awkward to decline (though a few have done so when I've passed on requests). Some of us have done our bit of bombarding.

For poetry I let down my trade of journalism and - because I don't actually know many poems -  offered Humbert Wolfe's Victorian lines, which always raise a smile:

You cannot hope

to bribe or twist,
   thank God! the
British journalist.
    But, seeing what
the man will do
    unbribed, there's
no occasion to