Aknowledgements
All material from Denny’s private papers is copyright the estate of Sandy Denny and reproduced with permission. Special thanks to Elizabeth Hurtt-Lucas, Pamela Hurtt, Miranda Ward and Pamela Murray Winters.
Endnotes
1. Information courtesy of David Mercer and Geoff Sullivan.
2. Cf. Ashley Hutchings: ‘I slept with her once, but that was for comfort. That wasn’t for sexual reasons’ (quoted in Hinton and Wall 2002, p. 71).
3. However unwittingly, the compilers of the Fledg’ling collection of Denny’s work, A Boxful of Treasures, showed singular insight by incorporating into the cover art some of Tenniel’s illustrations to Alice in Wonderland. Returning to Carroll’s masterpiece with Denny in mind, it is chilling to come upon Alice’s comment as she plunges down the well: ‘"Well!" thought Alice to herself. "After such a fall as this I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs!"’ (Carroll 1971, p. 13).
4. Information courtesy of Steve Shutt. I wonder whether her folk inheritance may also be in play here. Celtic legend assigns significance to borderlands – the boundaries between night and day and between the seasons. In Celtic religion the festival of Samhain, marking the end of summer and the start of winter, was celebrated on 1 November (i.e. All Saints’ Day in the Christian calendar, ‘after Halloween’ in Denny’s language). It was a period considered outside or suspended from time, a time of ‘immense spiritual energy’, when 'the worlds of life and death were inextricably intertwined' (Green 1992, pp. 185-6).
5. Gina Glazer recalls sitting in a café with Denny when a ‘cutesy-poo in her mini-skirt walked by’ (quoted in Winters). Denny’s comment – ‘If I looked like that and sang the way I do, I’d be famous’ – sums up the contradictions in her personality: insecurity about her appearance, kept at bay by finding a deep reassurance in her music, both emotions combined with a ‘success neurosis’ (her phrase, Nightingale 1971) which may be hard to understand in today’s celebrity-obsessed culture – wanting enough of it to achieve her musical ambitions but not so much that she cannot go into a café unrecognised.
6. This knowledge is not as common as Linda Thompson implies. Although Kingsley Abbott, a confidant of the young Fairporters, recalled that ‘she obviously was very keen on Richard initially’ (Hinton and Wall 2002, p. 70), the claim was not repeated by Pam Winters’ other interviewees, and Miranda Ward is sceptical, pointing to her friend’s preference for ‘older men’. Another conundrum is Richard Thompson’s song ‘That’s All, Amen, Close the Door’ (on Mock Tudor, 1999), a lyric strewn with ambiguous references to Denny, which could be read as a very belated reply to ‘Nothing More’ (‘Please don’t ask for more / […] Was I in love? / In love enough to know’), although its primary meaning seems to be that, since ‘she gave as much / As she had to give’, we, her audience, should ask for nothing more.
7. Information courtesy of Pete Townshend.
8. This is one of the Hebrew proverbs (‘Adagia hebraica’) collected by Ray (1678, pp. 408-9). In the original it reads ‘Thy secret is thy prisoner’, etc.; Ray also had several sentences of commentary following the one she quotes (‘We ought to be as careful’, etc.). Obviously she must have encountered these lines in some modern source - possibly a dictionary of quotations, as various other references to ‘secrets’ and ‘secrecy’ are recorded on the same sheet. In ‘The King and Queen of England’ she pursues the idea that music holds secrets under lock and key: ‘Every note of each song brings a vision / Of love and of pain back to me. / Like a captive I’ve locked in a prison / And whose liberty rests upon me’.
9. Cecil Sharp wrote in 1907: ‘So far as I am aware, no English collector has yet found a folk tune in the lydian mode. […] The English folk singer, to judge by his tunes, is very sensitive to the harsh effect of the tritone, which, of course, is the characteristic interval of the lydian mode’ (Sharp 1965, pp. 68-9).
10. There was a technical consideration here as well, as she told Rolling Stone magazine: ‘I’ve gotten better as a pianist just through having played. At first, I couldn’t play and sing at the same time. It took me a long time to learn to do it. It was so alien. I was trained to play classical pieces, and I simply could not coordinate the parts at first’ (Moore 1973).
11. Ann Powers, Village Voice, 12 May 1992, quoted in Reynolds and Press 1995, p. 348. Christine Pegg, then married to Fairport’s long-serving bass player, was also struck by Denny’s other-worldliness: ‘she had an incredible imagination and lived in a slightly different world to the rest of us’ (Irvin 1998, p. 54).
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