Davy Graham - He Moved through the Fair: The Complete 1960s Recordings (2024)

Cherry Tree, the folk/singer-songwriter imprint of the Cherry Red record label, have announced the release of Davy Graham: He Moved Through The Fair – The Complete 1960s Recordings, 8CD Box Set. The set includes Graham’s first recording, released on Topic Records (3/4 A.D. – later reissued in 2013), The Guitar Player, Folk, Blues & Beyond, Folk Roots, New Routes (with Shirley Collins), Midnight Man, After Hours (Live at Hull University, 4th February 1967), Large as Life & Twice as Natural, Hat, and The Holly Kaleidoscope and Godington Boundary.

Alongside additional live recordings, five are shown as previously unreleased recordings: Worksong, Saturday Night Shuffle, Angi, God Loves His Children, Brother, and Hey Bud Blues.

Here he is performing She Moved Through the Fair in 1963 on the TV programme Hullabaloo. You may also spot a young Martin Carthy seated behind him.



Long-time readers of KLOF Mag may recall the earlier reissues (and remastered) releases of Hat and Midnight Man in 2019 via Bread and Wine. When reviewing both albums, Danny Neill notes:

Listening again to the two sixties Decca albums that Bread And Wine have re-issued, there is a suggestion that Davy Graham was, in his own way, trying to deliver work that would be popular and well-received. He certainly wasn’t being a difficult artist; the problem (if there was one, it would only have been in terms of sales figures, not musical capacity) was that the average, casual listener is more comfortable with categorisation. But Davy was casting his net all over the place; on the ‘Midnight Man’ album, he had tried amplified guitar on three tracks; one of these was a cover of Rufus Thomas’s 1963 Stax hit ‘Walking The Dog’; an odd marriage on paper but this all-rounder carries it like a natural soul man. …in ‘Hat,’ he opens with a version of the Beatles ‘Getting Better, an interpretation that gives the relentlessly positive Paul McCartney a run for his money in uplifting vibes. How many albums buffer between summer-of-love pop, Jimmy Witherspoon’s ‘Lotus Blossom’ and Art Blakey’s study in Jazz rhythms ‘Buhaina Chant’ within the first four tracks and retain any cohesive sense? If you get behind Davy Graham’s vision and open-minded approach to music, it all stacks up naturally, but sadly, I’m not sure that enough people did, even in an era as progressive as the late sixties.

In that review, Danny also recalled seeing Graham live, a couple of years before his 2008 death, playing at a month-long festival of folk at Spitalfields in London:

The guitar playing was still of a masterful standard, with the occasional bit of singing less so, but that was never his strongest asset. What I remember above all, though, was the sense that this man was not interested in the art of performance one little bit. People talk about Bob Dylan paying no attention to his audience, but compared to the Davy I saw that night, Bob is a veritable people-pleasing raconteur. Davy lifted his hat once or twice; he even listened when the odd brave punter shouted out a request, but only because he preferred total silence whilst playing; there was no intention to honour any shout-outs. He was so disengaged with the people present that you wondered if he’d even been told he was turning up to play a gig, if, in fact, there had been some subterfuge in getting him to attend and agreeing to go up on stage and knock out a few tunes was part of a negotiation to be released from this awkward social engagement. After about 45 minutes, he wordlessly got up off his stool and left. So too, the audience shuffled out bemusedly around 9.30pm but, from what I recall, no one complained; after all, we had still spent some thrilling private moments with an absolute master. The lack of ceremony emphasised the preciousness of what we had just witnessed. Had he lived, I would definitely have grabbed the chance to see him again.

Here’s a rare clip – Graham playing God Bless The Child live at the 2nd ‘Folk Heroes’ gig, Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, April 30th 2000.



Around the time Beverley Martyn released The Phoenix And The Turtle, Mark Pavey, who produced her album, contacted me, and we ended up having long chats about folk music of the 60s and 70s. Mark revealed how he had encouraged Davy to start touring again and helped him to pursue the royalties he was owed. During this period, Mark made a revealing feature-length movie of Davy travelling to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2005 with Bert Jansch. It’s interspersed throughout with archive footage as well as interviews with both Davy and close friends such as James Hamilton (Founder and Editor of Encyclopaedia Psychedelia International). The opening scene is quite shocking as you see Graham’s living conditions – an old single room – a bedsit – he would have been 65 years old.