Sandy Denny: a people's history

A few years ago, I bought a book called "Gonna see all my friends" and subtitled "A people's history of Fairport Convention". I thought that the book might provide an up-to-date history of this long running band, as the two previous books ("Meet on the ledge", "The Woodworm years", IIRC) only went as far as possibly 1990 - and that was 26 years ago! Reading the book, I was quickly disabused of this notion: the book consisted of short piece by numerous people, mainly recording their attendance at concerts or meeting the various musicians that played in the band. It was somewhat self-congratulatory and I'm not sure that I even finished reading it. Obviously someone who contributed text to the book was going to buy it and so I felt that it was somewhat like a 'vanity press' book: here's the text, here's £100 (probably much more now), print me 100 copies. The same company has published several books in the same vein.

So when I heard that they were compiling a similar book about Sandy Denny, initially I was in two minds as whether to contribute or not. Eventually I sent three different pieces to the publisher: one standard piece about how I learnt about Sandy and about the concerts where she appeared that I attended. I also sent one piece that had previously appeared in this blog, one about her songwriting style¹ and one about the an Israeli radio station playing her songs. 

The Sandy book arrived yesterday and I've been reading it since. As the book is arranged in chronological order, my first piece appears under the heading 22 March 1970, Colston Hall Bristol, which is where I saw Fotheringay, etc. I notice that the piece has been lightly edited but it still takes up an entire page.

If the book is going to continue in chronological order, then it seems that the other two pieces won't appear. Although I don't want to emphasize my contributions, this is a shame, as the pieces that I've read are almost entirely factual in the style of "I went to this concert", "I heard this record" and "I met someone who went to school with" with no critical content whatsoever. I've paged through the book, looking especially at the last third that includes pieces by Joe Boyd, Andrew Batt (compiler of many Sandy compilations) and others; whilst this part has a different tone, my extra contributions appear not to appear.

So here's the contribution that didn't get used: One Israeli radio station plays the 'Unhalfbricking' version of 'Who knows where the time goes' about once a week, although recently I heard what must be the original version from 'Sandy and the Strawbs' as it was only Sandy playing acoustic guitar and singing the original arrangement. I wonder how on earth the station managed to lay their hands on this version - it didn't come from me! My wife has become extremely enamoured of the song (finally, after 43 years of marriage!) and asked me to add it to her telephone playlist. She then asked if there were any other songs that she might like - I could think of at least one hundred - and so I sent her 'I'll keep it with mine'. It occurs to me now that IKIWM has several similarities to WKWTTG in terms of harmony - although in fact it should be written the other way around, as IKIWM was written in 1964 by Bob Dylan and WKWTTG was written in 1968 by Sandy Denny. There are several formal correspondences: both songs have three verses, neither song has a chorus, and both feature each song's title as the last line of every verse. Dylan does this frequently whereas Denny does it less often. The arrangements also are similar with Richard Thompson playing guitar obbligatos. There is a world of difference between the original Strawbs' version (Sandy solo) and the Fairport version, and today I wonder how much the arrangement of WKWTTG was inspired - if at all - by what they did with the Dylan song. Occasionally I wish the radio station would play some other song from 'Unhalfbricking', although I assume that they have some computer file and not the physical cd or even vinyl.

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