The voice evolves through her earliest professional recordings, made variously with Alex Campbell and Johnny Silvo. Her recording with The Strawbs in May 1967 of ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, the first of her many versions of the song and the one that inspired Judy Collins to record it also, is utterly distinctive. By the time she joined Fairport Convention in 1968, the characteristics are well established. ‘Fotheringay’, the opening track on What We Did On Our Holidays, displays the legato phrasing without trace of vibrato, the seemingly effortless breath control, the sense of a great power available to be unleashed but usually held back. For the next three or four years, many would say, her voice was at its peak, managing paradoxically to sound at once other-worldly and firmly grounded in the here-and-now, mournful yet inspiring. After that it acquired a ‘smokiness’ – literally, from a heavy habit – but most of its quality survives to the final concert, as we can hear by comparing ‘The Lady’, delivered solo with piano in 1977, with the studio recording of the song from 1972.
I used to think when I was a lot younger that just a beautiful sounding voice was all you needed, but I realise now that isn’t particularly where it’s at. It’s just the instrument – like you can have a beautiful sounding Martin guitar, but still not know how to play it – and that’s what I mean about a voice. At one point I was so hung up on producing a beautiful sound that I forgot what singing was really all about. The whole point of singing is to tell the story of the song – what’s the point of singing words if they don’t mean anything? (Peacock 1972a)
At another point she admits that beautification is another form of evasion. Perhaps mindful of the rawness of ‘authentic’ folk singers, she opens up another front for self-defeat:
I do dishonest things when I’m singing. I use my voice in a way that I know sounds good – so I do it. Yes, and I know you could call that technique, but to me it’s being a bit deceitful. The problem is, how far can you go with honesty? (Nightingale 1971)
Denny was known to admire Janis Joplin. As early as 1968 she was experimenting with a mixture of gin and Southern Comfort, as she recorded in a notebook, to ‘see if I too could produce the shattered effects which Janis Joplin seems to acquire as a result of drinking it’ (Heylin 2000, p. 78). The question this raises is: did Joplin’s ‘shattered effects’ represent a musical challenge, an anti-beauty the emulation of which would stretch Denny’s own technique, or were they the visceral self-expression of a white blues singer delivered with an honesty that both fascinated and frightened this English singer who did not like people to know what she was thinking? Had Joplin gone ‘too far’ with honesty?
Honesty, like sincerity, was a quality valued in the folk clubs, and Denny was always ambivalent about the ‘folk’ movement. In the mid-1960s, it attracted her as a place to develop her art, as both vocalist and songwriter. She knew that she did not fit the pop industry’s image of the ‘girl singer’ (a frequent theme in interviews) and, although the folk revival had thrown up its own female stereotype - that of the sensitive ballad-singer modelled on the young Joan Baez -, it ‘was at least an active one’ (Laing et al 1975, p. 80). Alone on stage with a guitar, the female singer was in control of her material and of the audience’s response to that material. Folk clubs were also the only outlet for the rising generation of ‘singer-songwriters’, male and female, unless they could cross over into the mainstream, as some did successfully in the 1970s. In such venues, sometimes, Denny confessed to being ‘frowned on by the ethnics’ (the term then in use for adherents of the unadulterated tradition - Laing et al 1975, pp. 158, 160): she sang accompanied; she mixed traditional repertoire with modern ‘folk’ songs by Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton and Jackson Frank; she even, horribile dictu, slipped in one or two of her own early compositions. But by 1968 she had decided that ‘the simplicity and naiveness of one voice and a guitar is rather insipid […] I wanted to do something more with my voice’ (Wilson 1968). In joining Fairport she doubtless hoped to develop her songwriting as well as her voice. When she discovered that Liege and Lief (1969) was to be, not a one-off experiment in electrifying traditional material, but a template for the band’s future work, this restless individual bailed out.
Hers was not the temperament of the traditionalist. She was too easily bored. If she had to sing ‘Matty Groves’ again, she quipped on the eve of her final tour, she would throw herself out of a window (Irwin 1977). Whereas the traditionalist emphasised the transmission of a folk canon, she was attracted to the songs qua songs. Apart from the pleasure she took in the music, there was the chance they offered to ventriloquise her private concerns free of the fear of self-disclosure which, as we shall see, constrained her own songwriting. In an interesting article on ‘Female Identity and the Woman Songwriter’, Charlotte Greig (1997) quotes the great folk song ‘Gathering Rushes in the Month of May’, a song memorably revived in the 1960s by Anne Briggs. As Greig observes, this is a song which addresses its difficult subject matter – illicit sex, unmarried motherhood, the battle of wills between father and daughter – with a directness that no contemporary pop song could possibly match. ‘Gathering Rushes’ was not in Denny’s folk repertoire, but she was attached to another tale of faithless men and too-trusting women she learned from Briggs, probably via Bert Jansch – ‘Blackwaterside’. Performing the song at the Lincoln Folk Festival in 1971, she introduced it with her characteristic mixture of chirpy self-deprecation and bumbling optimism:
This is called ‘Blackwaterside’. It’s about this poor lady who got led astray by some bloke and found she was in a lot of trouble. But I’m sure she survived. We all do, you know.
This is a travesty of a folk song ‘intro’. Folk singers, according to the ‘traddies’, were supposed to tell you facts like who collected the song and how long it had been in the tradition. Denny will have none of this; she homes in without ceremony on the content, describing it with an explicitness she would never apply to her own writing, and audibly identifying with it. ‘Blackwaterside’ has become her song. In the project to reclaim folk music, how was the listener to hear the personal behind the fustily archetypal? The answer lay in the conviction, the intensity, with which the singer delivered her material, thereby personalising it. Thus the voice had to do even more work.
‘The way I sing is a bit folky’, she conceded, but ‘it’s a style rather than a definition of what folk music is’ (Gilbert 1973, p. 23). One lingering residue of that style, which I have nowhere seen remarked upon, is that she continues to sing in her own accent, long after most other ‘folk’ elements have disappeared from her music. Whereas, then as now, every aspiring British pop artist - like the young Elton John who ‘supported’ (i.e. spectacularly upstaged) her band Fotheringay at a Royal Albert Hall gig in 1970 – would assume a fake ‘American’ (or ‘mid-Atlantic’?) accent for performance, she stuck solidly to the southern English accent of her upbringing. Only when the song demanded it – like the rock’n’roll standards she recorded on The Bunch album – was an ‘American’ accent put on.
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