'The lady she had a silver tongue': Sandy Denny as singer-songwriter (2005)

1  Introduction

Thanks to Clinton Heylin’s biography, published in 2000, we now know everything we could want to know about the British singer-songwriter Sandy Denny, ‘first lady of folk-rock’. Indeed, we probably know more than we want to know. Revelations about her refusal to shape up to her addictions during pregnancy, about her difficulties in coping with motherhood and her new-born, and more besides, test the loyalty of all who saw her on stage or who cherish the recordings she made in a productive decade between 1967 and 1977. ‘Slapstick Tragedies’ was the working title of one of her LPs (Coleman 1971); the phrase was not retained but it is a sadly apt epitaph for a career cut short at the age of 31 when, after a serious fall, she succumbed to a brain haemorrhage. Falling down is the stuff of knockabout comedy, but not here. ‘Slapstick tragedies’ - also implicit in the phrase is the contrast, which even those who never saw her in concert can reconstruct from live recordings, between the comedic brightness of her onstage patter (‘looning about’, to use one of her phrases) and the solemn intensity of her own compositions in performance. Paradox was likewise a theme of Melody Maker’s thoughtful obituary (Irwin 1978), which pondered why this conflicted artist had had enough ambition to launch herself into the London folk scene in the 1960s but not enough determination, or self-belief, to carry her as far as her talent could, and should, have taken her.

In recent years Denny’s star has started to rise again. ‘Sandy Denny was the greatest female singer-songwriter this country has produced’, the Sunday Express trumpeted in an article marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the singer’s death (Humphries 2003). You would expect, if this claim were true – and I happen to think it is – that hers would be a household name. That it is not points to a deficit in public appreciation of this magnificent, complex and highly subtle artist. No one who has heard her doubts that she was a great singer. As an interpreter of traditional material and of songs by contemporaries like Bob Dylan, Richard Thompson and Joni Mitchell, she was peerless. What appears less secure is the status of her own songwriting and how she projected those songs in the role of ‘singer-songwriter’: to this day there are still critics (like Greig 2004) who regret her ‘drift’ away from traditional music towards the ‘singer-songwriter zone’. This article will make a case for her seriousness of purpose as a songwriter, mainly through a close reading of her lyrics, but also argue that it matters who is singing them. There is authority in authorship.

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