This article will try to penetrate the arcanum of Denny’s art, the mystery which she was so reluctant to discuss, the ‘meaning’ of the songs. First, some caveats. There are Denny fans who assert that they never listen to the words; they find her voice so compellingly siren-like that she could be singing from the telephone directory for all they care. Then again, the lyrics are, at a certain level, private; specificities are concealed or buried, thus wrongfooting the investigator, even thirty years after the event, who feels ashamed and minded to back off, all the more so when he discovers how defensive her friends and fellow musicians still are of her reputation. We should resist the univocal interpretation of her lyrics; often, in her lifetime, several people in her circle thought that a particular song was ‘about’ them, and our individual response is all the richer if the listener can feel personal ‘ownership’ of a song: after all, if a particular lyric is ‘about’ Richard Thompson, can it still be about me, or you, or us? One senses that her lyrics are most obscure when she was being most specific, carrying the risk that as she piled elaboration upon elaboration she lost sight of what she was trying to say. In her very best work, however, definable ‘meanings’ coexist with a ‘poetic’ ambiguity. A song like ‘The Pond and the Stream’ manages to be highly specific without denying the potential for generality which enables it to speak beyond its proximate cause. Finally, we must remember that everything she wrote was written for her voice. Her close attention to rhyme – not only end-rhyme on long vowels but frequent internal rhyming as well – perfectly suits her legato phrasing and signifies a controlling artistic instinct. ‘I can’t ryme [sic] when I’m upset’, she confesses in one notebook. Inevitably, on occasion, a word is chosen for its sound not its meaning, and the interpreter must beware of becoming the over-interpreter.

As if to proof her songs against such prying impertinence, Denny’s favourite form is the cryptogram. The songs are ‘biographical’, she told an interviewer; only ‘about ten people can understand them’ (Denselow 1971). Her most obscure lyrics are constructed like sets of crossword clues, with the difference that, whereas cryptic crosswords are meant to be soluble by any addict, Denny’s lyric clues, containing so much personal reference, were only to be understood by ‘ten people’. She delivered a whole series of portraits in song: few attempts have been made to decode them, beyond the simple observation that a particular song is ‘about’ someone. Take the song ‘Next Time Around’ (recently covered by Emiliana Torrini). One of the most striking numbers on The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, this, we are told (and it is all we are told), is ‘about’ Jackson C Frank. From the obscure piano vamp that opens the song, circling around G minor, we detect no stylistic connection to the American troubadour who made such an impact on the London folk scene of the mid ’sixties and became Denny’s first ‘serious’ boyfriend. But a close examination of the lyric reveals how Frank – and Denny herself – are firmly embedded in it. The first line introduces a ‘question […] about time’: this may be the question posed in Denny’s signature song, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ or it may be some overdue question posed by one lover to the other (in the colloquial sense of ‘about time too’). Lines 3 and 4 are a riddle: ‘The house it was built by some man in a rhyme, / But whatever came of his talented son?’ The ‘man in a rhyme’ is ‘Jack’ (‘The House That Jack Built’); add the next line and we have ‘Jack’s son’ or ‘Jackson’. The next two lines allude to Frank’s song ‘Dialogue’ and its first line, ‘I want to be alone’. Frank did indeed come from Buffalo (mentioned in the last line of verse 1). The ‘stories about God and you’ may refer to Frank’s nervous breakdown after he returned to the US, which was accompanied by delusional episodes. As a child Frank had been caught up in a serious fire at his school in which half of his classmates lost their lives. As well as carrying physical scars for the rest of his life, Frank was traumatised by the incident (which may have contributed to his later schizophrenia). Denny’s second verse seems to allude to these events. An official US inquiry blamed the disaster on the bad design of the school buildings: in the song, the buildings fall down ‘because of the architect’ and the children (‘seeds’) are ‘smothered or drowned’. In the final lines of verse two Denny wishes she were elsewhere, ‘maybe the ocean next time around’. This not only links the song to the whole series of water metaphors in other lyrics but may also allegorize whatever differences led to their break-up. In the rather pretentious sleevenotes that Frank supplied for the sole LP of his career, he wrote: ‘I am afraid of the ocean as much as the possibility it is really my mother’. The third verse, with its references to ‘dusty black windows’, ‘dark stairs’ and ‘candles all gnarled in the musty air’, surely takes us to The Barge, the Kingston folk club located on an old Dutch sailing barge, where both Frank and Denny performed in 1965. The performing space at The Barge was below decks, reached by a flight of stairs lit by the only windows in the place, where resident singers and guests were dependent on intermittent generator power and candlelight – a health and safety nightmare by modern standards and surely an ordeal for the fire-damaged Frank. One regular in the audience recalls that the barge had the smell of ‘musty air’ common to all timber vessels.¹ The club’s driving force was one Theo Johnson, an ex-merchant seaman with a taste for bawdy, who appears in the song like some figure of folklore as ‘Theo the sailor who sings in his lair’. Johnson, who played (or tried to play) an enabling role in the early careers of both Denny and her contemporary John Martyn, did indeed ‘sing in his lair’. His confident voice can be heard on the album Hootenanny at The Barge (1965) and, according to a flyer preserved among Denny’s papers, he shared the bill with his protegee at a folk concert in Porchester Hall, London, on 25 November 1966.

The riddle, such as she employs in ‘Next Time Around’, is a form with deep roots in English culture; it is found in Anglo-Saxon literature, as well as in folk songs like ‘Nottamun Town’. Another time-honoured trope is the reverse personification, in which people acquire non-human characteristics:

My songs are usually written from experience; they’re my experiences of people.Like sometimes those kinds of metaphorical things about rivers and streams might be referring to a particular person […] Some people are very easily described in natural terms, in atmospheres, and the way I feel always comes out in some kind of description of some kind of natural force (BBC 1972).

This implies that songs which sounded to their first listeners like vaguely realised Blakeian evocations of ‘England’s pleasant pastures’ trodden by ‘feet in ancient time’ may, in fact, be tightly coded and more artful than we realised, if we have the key to the cipher. ‘The Pond and the Stream’ opens with the lines: ‘Annie wanders on the land. / She loves the freedom of the air’. ‘Annie’ has been identified as the folk singer Anne Briggs, ‘the best girl singer of traditional music’, as Denny told Roy Shipston (1970), albeit ‘a really weird chick’. Thanks to this knowledge, the lyric certainly becomes richer. In Denny’s eyes, Anne Briggs represented the ‘real’ folk singer: a ‘traddie’ who sang unaccompanied, not part of the ‘layabout section’ in which Denny classed herself (with guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn (Irwin 1977)). Briggs led an itinerant life, relishing the ‘freedom of the air’; Denny was a reluctant traveller with an unashamed attachment to home comforts. Briggs epitomises all Denny’s equivocal feelings about the folk revival movement and, within its field of view, the song includes the songwriter, who is placed in relation to the subject (‘they’re my experiences of people’). ‘But I live in the city / And imagine country scenes’, she sings. Self-divided as ever, romantically envious of the wandering minstrel yet unable to subscribe fully to either the lifestyle or the concomitant musical style, Denny continues to ‘live behind the screen’.

It is possible that symbols retain quite fixed meanings for her. Whether they open out into anything like the elaborate symbology that Ian MacDonald (2003) uncovered in Nick Drake’s lyrics is another matter. There is assuredly no poverty of ambition in Denny’s tackling of philosophical themes. From her notebooks we know that Denny’s most famous song – ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ – was originally called ‘Ballad of Time’. There is aptness in her first choice of title, and foresight, for so many of her later songs are ‘ballads of time’. A close examination of the lyrics of ‘Who Knows…’ reveals that in what is surely one of her earliest compositions her lifelong thematic preoccupations are already established. At the outset she sets up an opposition between the ungovernable passage of time (who knows where it goes?) and her own indifference to it (‘I have no thought of time’). In photographs Denny is rarely seen wearing a watch. Love is a defence against both the passing of time and the horror of loneliness: while her love is near her she is ‘not alone’ and has ‘no fear of time’. When she is alone (and unpartnered) thoughts of time can only be banished by day-dreaming (‘Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming’). Time is also measured in this song by the migration of birds (‘how can they know it’s time for them to go?’) and the succession of seasons (the ‘storms of winter and then the birds in spring again’). Birds are actuated by some biological clock that the singer does not pretend to understand, but their greatest asset is the power of flight. Flight was to become a recurrent theme in Denny’s lyrics, both in the sense of aerial adventure and that of escape. The birds are escaping an English winter by flying south, leaving behind them a ‘sad, deserted shore’. And the singer herself ‘will still be here’; she has ‘no thought of leaving’. We may imagine her left behind on the shore, which would be appropriate, since the margin between water and land is a critical site in many of her songs, as we shall see.

We can now follow how these themes pan out in subsequent lyrics, beginning with time itself. On occasions such as she describes in ‘Who Knows…’ time can seem oceanically unending. More often, it manifests itself as the constraint of clock-time: ‘Time – what is that? I’ve no time to care’, she sings in ‘The Sea’. On her demo tape of ‘Rising for the Moon’, a metronome audibly ticks in the background: musical time measured out in bar lines, a curiosity this, for some of her most memorable recordings, folk songs over a drone or languid guitar arpeggio (‘The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood’ in the version recorded with Fairport, ‘The Banks of the Nile’), embody rhythmic freedom, musical open-endedness. Her contemporary Nick Drake apparently believed that the world was heading for some geopolitical Armageddon around 1980 (Humphries 1997, p. 184); for Richard Thompson, 1975 was going to be the ‘apocalypse year’ (Hinton and Wall 2002, p. 63). Denny, by contrast, appears to have given little thought to the future: ‘The future is like the next minute and the minute after. We don’t know what will happen between now and eight o’clock tonight. I can’t think of a week ahead’ (Nightingale 1971). As a result, her actions seem to have been governed by a naïve optimism, the optimism of one who supposes, for example, that having a baby will turn a life – and a failing marriage - around. She did not have plans - she had dreams. In contrast to her contemporaries’ Cold War fears for the 1980s, Denny’s future is a dreamscape of ‘tall brown people’ who will puzzle over Donovan’s albums in centuries to come (‘Late November’). Where she lived was the present, a present more intensely felt than most of our presents and suffused by an emotionally recalled past.

Time present is routinized into cycles, of which two are important, the annual and the diurnal. The annual cycle of the seasons is a recurrent concern, autumn and winter being especially favoured. With so many references in the songs to falling leaves – invoked as an image of freedom in ‘By the Time It Gets Dark’ (‘Got to be free as the leaves in autumn’) - we are left with the impression that this was ‘her’ time of year, albeit an emotionally testing one because it brought longer nights. Song titles point the same way: ‘Late November’, ‘After Halloween’. In one of Denny’s most ambitious works, ‘All Our Days’, which her arranger Harry Robinson elaborated into a seven-minute orchestral fantasy complete with ingenious allusions to the English pastoral style of Delius and Vaughan Williams, she devotes one verse each to autumn and winter but forces spring and summer to share a verse.

Within the cycle of the solar year is contained the microcycle of day and night, and this provides her with another rich thematic complex: day – dusk – night – dawn – day. Denny seems never to have overcome a childhood fear of the dark. As she confides in a notebook: ‘I never really want to sleep at night if I’m not with my man or if I’m all alone. It’s a different thing when the dawn arrives and I know I’m OK.’ By the mid 1970s she was relying increasingly on sleeping pills. ‘By the Time It Gets Dark’, a song written for Rendezvous but omitted from the final record, is that rare thing in her canon, a happy song – happy, because it imagines her childhood fear vanquished: