Anyone looking to see Davy Graham’s name listed among the festivities at the Barbican’s Folk Britannia weekend would have been forgiven for missing him. With many of his contemporaries — Martin Carthy, Bert Jansch — receiving prominent billings, Graham himself was represented only by some grainy monochrome footage of his younger self in the screening room.
As his old peers congregated a couple of miles down the road, it was appropriate that the elusive Graham should have been found where he has always existed — ploughing his own furrow, slightly outside the circle. This is how it was in 1964, when — with Folk Roots, New Routes — he and Shirley Collins demonstrated the resilience of British traditional songs by conferring a host of inspired jazz and Middle Eastern- influenced arrangements upon them. Over 40 years on, supplementing his meagre royalties by teaching guitar, he’s all but left British folk behind. Very little of what he played was recognisable to owners of those early albums. But then, as this physically imposing legend, now 66, pointed out to a surprisingly young crowd, they weren’t around back then either. Instead, much of the material he favoured was centuries older: an Indian folk song hailing from Porbandar, Mahatma Gandhi’s birthplace, was tackled with an elemental gusto more common to old bluesmen; another instrumental meditation signalled a detour into Spanish classical music.
The longer he played, the less blue space seemed to divide the continents on the small illuminated globe placed beside his stool. It was heartening to find him in far better shape than his well-documented heroin dependency would have portended — although his playing lacked the restraint and precision of his younger years. However, given the material he favours these days, that’s not always a problem.
In fact, a string of indigenous Romanian and Armenian tunes benefited from his rough, visceral picking. In the circumstances, it was hard not to sympathise with one of his students when — apropos of nothing — Graham called his prot?g? on to the stage to perform a couple of numbers while he had a rest. Whatever else may have changed, it still takes a brave man to follow Davy Graham. Just as it did 40 years ago.