“She Moved Thru' the Bizarre”: Davy Graham and Irish Orientalism

Abstract

Davy Graham's innovative 1963 rendition of the Donegal air “She Moved Through the Fair” and his “theory” of “a connection between Oriental music and the folk music of Ireland” are, I contend, best read under the rubric of Irish Orientalism. To demonstrate, I examine the writings of Herbert Hughes, the Celtic Revivalist who collected the air, explore Graham's background as son of a Scots father and Guyanese mother, and analyze how Graham's rhetoric engages Orientalist constructions of the exotic and female. Finally, I show that the DADGAD tuning Graham invented has become, for numerous Western guitarists, a signifier of exotic Otherness.

Notes

^[1] On his 1960s-period records, Graham's first name was consistently spelled “Davy.” By the 1976 album All That Moody, it was being spelled with an “e”—“Davey.” Some writers on Graham spell it the first way, some the second. As the majority of his recordings are ascribed to Davy Graham (no “e”), that is the spelling I have used in this essay.

^[2] The founding artifact of the folk baroque movement is the 1964 album folk roots, new routes by Shirley Collins (singer) and Davey Graham (accompanist). The record is like a map of the musical territory that would bloom under the hands of bands such as Pentangle and Fairport Convention, only Collins and Graham walked there first. At a moment when purists held that any authentic British folk music must be sung unaccompanied, Graham did not merely accompany Collins, he brought his instrument to the fore. Moreover, his polyglot, cosmopolitan sensibility was on full display in the arrangements he provided—some of them swinging, some sounding like early music, in his intermittent use of the DAGAD tuning, and in his two solo showcases, both of them jazz numbers—“Blue Monk” and “Grooveyard.”

^[3] The list of Graham's guitarist admirers is quite long, but it includes, in addition to the five players mentioned here, Martin Carthy, Richard Thompson, and Johnny Marr.

^[4] The title of this Graham composition is sometimes spelled “Angi” and sometimes “Anji.” When it first appeared on the EP “3/4” A. D. by Alexis Korner and Davy Graham in 1963, it was spelled with a “g.” When Graham re-recorded it for 1976's All That Moody, he spelled it with a “j.” Bert Jansch, whose rendition of the piece arguably became better known than Graham's own, spells it with a “j.”

^[5] Will Hodgkinson, author of the 2005 Guardian piece, went on to publish the book Guitar Man in 2007. Written for a popular audience, it chronicles Hodgkinson's personal journey as he attempts to go from knowing nothing about guitar playing to being able to execute a passable rendition of Graham's “Anji” (or “Angi”; see note 4) within the span of a few months. Hodgkinson receives guidance—and information about Davy Graham—from Bert Jansch among others, and the book includes a chapter documenting a visit with Graham himself (who lives up to his reputation for being an enigmatic, elusive, and often extremely charming interlocutor).

^[6] The clip appears to come from a 1963 episode of the British Tonight show, which was hosted from time to time during the late 1950s and early 1960s by McEwen (McEwen). I first came across the clip on YouTube in 2007. That version seems to have since disappeared from the Internet, but another version, posted to YouTube in 2012, is readily accessible (see “Davy”). The clip has also been featured in the recent BBC documentary Folk Britannia. (Indeed, one episode of this multi-part film takes its title from the groundbreaking 1964 album by Shirley Collins and Graham, folk roots, new routes.) Graham was no stranger to television: the 1959 BBC Monitor episode Hound Dogs and Bach Addicts:The Guitar Craze, directed by Ken Russell, features a teenaged Graham performing a highly accomplished solo guitar rendition of the jazz ballad “Cry Me a River.” And on several occasions in the early 1960s, Graham and Alexis Korner appeared together on TV backing “Australian folk singer Shirley Abicair” (Harper 6–7).

^[7] In strictly musical terms, “A Lotus on Irish Streams” probably exhibits fewer “Indian” features than any other Mahavishnu Orchestra number. (McLaughlin's music from the 1970s is typically saturated with Indian musical influence.) In “A Lotus on Irish Streams,” the putative “Indian” dimension appears not so much at the level of rhythm, harmony, or melody as in the sense of tranquility—one is tempted to say “meditative” tranquility—evoked by the composition and performance. To impute to something “Eastern” or “Indian” the power to calm and restore a supposedly uptight Western sensibility is to employ a classic trope of Orientalism (Said 257). And of course McLaughlin's title for the song perfectly echoes the rhetoric of Irish Orientalism as deployed by writers such as Yeats.

^[8] Though a champion of Irish culture, Yeats was not “Irish” enough for some militant Irish nationalists. His family were Protestants and he spent large amounts of time and energy moving in the artistic circles of London. By 1910, he was even receiving a monthly pension from the UK prime minister (Lennon 271). In the words of Lennon, “Yeats felt conflicting allegiances to the Irish and English cultures, for he identified, in a sense, with the cultures of both the colonized and the colonizer” (271). This “hybrid position as an Anglo-Irish poet allowed him access to the narratives of both the colonizer and the colonized” (248).

^[9] No doubt some of the overtly imperialist scholars of Oriental studies saw themselves as “friends” of India too.

^[10] Said frames Renan as one of the founders of Anglo-French Orientalism: “It was [Renan's] task to solidify the official discourse of Orientalism, to systematize its insights, and to establish its intellectual and worldly institutions” (130).

^[11] By 1834, Thomas Moore had published ten volumes of Irish Melodies (Lancaster 4).

^[12] Hughes (1882–1937) was born in Belfast and “was immersed in native folk song from a very young age” (Lancaster 5). He began working as a church organist in the city while still a youth and then moved to London to study at the Royal College of Music. His tutor there was “another Belfast man, Charles Wood, who may have encouraged Hughes's interest in Irish folk song, for in 1904” the two men became “founder members of the Irish Folk Song Society of London” (5). Hughes later became a prominent critic for the Daily Telegraph. This blend of interests and habitations—English alongside Irish—can be seen as putting Hughes in a hybrid position similar to that of Yeats.

^[13] In his Preface to Irish Country Songs, Hughes notes that in Ireland “an alien language has been thrust upon the people,” so that, in most cases, “the original Gaelic words” of Irish folk songs have been “lost and forgotten” (iv). Moreover, “many very beautiful airs have been set by modern versifiers to words (in English) of appalling banality” (iv). In his English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, Hughes's English counterpart Cecil Sharp is much more concerned with melodies and musical form than with lyrics per se.

^[14] Regarding Colum's 1909 lyric, it should be noted that it nowhere contains the word “dead” or the phrase “my dead love.” By contrast, numerous singers of more recent vintage change the opening lines of Colum's last verse from “Last night she came to me/My young love came in” to “Last night she came to me/My dead love came in.” This practice effectively transforms the song into a ghost story. Yet Colum's spare lyric, as published in Irish Country Songs, Volume 1, contains no hint of the Gothic. As for Yeats's lyric to “Down by the Salley Gardens,” it draws on that of the traditional ballad “Ye Rambling Boys of Pleasure.” Many Internet discussants of Colum's lyric for “She Moved Thro' the Fair” see it as resembling two other Irish traditional lyrics—“Our Wedding Day” and “Out the Window.” See, for example, postings on the blog run by Zalamanda.

^[15] For instance, both the websites Piano Play It and Flute Tunes list “She Moved Through the Fair” (along with just a handful of other popular numbers) as perfectly exemplifying a melody cast in the Mixolydian mode (www.piano-play-it.com; www.flutetunes.com).

^[16] Had he heard it, Hughes might have been dismissive of the simple harmonic setting Fairport provides for the song. However, I daresay he would have been bowled over by the vocal performance of the now-legendary Sandy Denny. Her decorations of the melody line—which include the odd quarter-tone—are shiver-inducing.

^[17] Hughes uses this phrase (“our National Melodies”), with this capitalization, in his dedication to the volume.

^[18] To be clear, when Bourgault-Ducourdray refers to “Oriental scales” here, he has in mind music from the Greek isles, not India. Such is the sweeping conception of “the East” that Orientalism enables.

^[19]Colum himself, when reprinting the melody and words decades later in his A Treasury of Irish Folklore, dispensed with the 1909 contraction, listing the title as “She Moved Through the Fair” (600).

^[20] The same recording of “She Moved Thru' the Bizarre/Blue Raga” appears as a bonus track on the 2003 CD reissue of Graham's first solo album, The Guitar Player.

^[21] The title of James Joyce's short story “Araby” refers to an open-air market in Dublin which becomes the locus of the main character's romantic fantasies.

^[22] The three quoted phrases come from the following Airplane sources: the song “Volunteers” on the LP Volunteers; the title of the LP Blows Against the Empire (technically credited to Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship); the song “Crown of Creation” from the LP Crown of Creation.

^[23] Of course it can be argued that the hippie interest in things “Indian” amounted to a kind of cultural consumerism. If the phenomenon reduces simply to that, then it becomes another arm of empire: an exploitative slumming—or “moving through the fair”— by people who, in a culture of white privilege, will never have to live the reality of being treated as “Indian.” Moreover, Lennon defines his “cross-colony” identifications as occurring “without the mediation of the imperial center” (268), while hippie “Indian” culture was comfortably at home in swinging London (Newman). That may simply mean that the phenomenon is best viewed through a post-colonial, as opposed to colonial, lens. But the meaning of such gestures is never completely fixed or univocal, and, in its initial moment, this gestural rhetoric of “Indian-ness” was typically read off, by both mainstream and counter-cultural audiences in Britain, as subversive.

^[24] See Jansch's performance of “Black Waterside” on his 1966 LP Jack Orion (released in the United States in 1970 on the Vanguard label). In calling Jansch a “Graham acolyte”—a term I think the modest Jansch might himself use—I mean nothing pejorative. Jansch's talent, sensibility, and influence were extraordinary, as attested by the many obituaries following his death in October 2011.

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John Kimsey

John Kimsey is an Associate Professor at DePaul University and received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests include popular music studies, modern literature and intersections between the two. His essays have appeared in journals such as Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, The Journal of Popular Music Studies,and The Journal of Prevention & Intervention in the Community, as well as numerous academic anthologies on Beatles music and culture. His song cycle Twisted Roots: Music, Politics and the American Dream Blues debuted in 2003 under a fellowship from the DePaul Humanities Center and has been described by jazz composer/performer/producer Ben Sidran as “an ingenious way to integrate political and social commentary into a musical architecture.” He is currently working on a book about Mississippi Delta music of the mid-20^th century and the Parchman Farm penitentiary, tentatively titled Another Man Done Gone.