Davey Graham, Spirit, Led Zeppelin April 16, 2016
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
…I’m not hugely exercised – despite being a bit of a fan of both groups, about the spat between Randy California’s estate and Led Zeppelin (who on occasion appear to have overlooked the provenance of some parts of early tracks) over the provenance of Stairway to Heaven. To some the song is an egregious rip of Spirit’s Taurus. And listening to the two? Well… judge for yourself…
But there’s an even earlier song that might claim being first on the scene, that being this…Davey Graham from 1959 (and a Ken Russell documentary).
Davey was quite a character, well worth further investigation it would seem.
Just on the video, as someone says in comments BTL, one can still see the bombed out houses from the second world war. An interesting moment in time.
They seem to have been fond of lifting from the folk scene. I notice ‘Black Mountain Side’ is credited to Jimmy Page on the album. I assume they wouldn’t deny that one since it’s clearly a cover with a slight name change, but odd not to credit it nonetheless.
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It wasn’t the only one by a long chalk.
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Also, Davy Graham is fantastic. I believe he was the first from the folk revival to use aspects of Indian and Arab music, before the hippies got their sitars. The “Folk, Blues & Beyond” album is great. And he did one with Shirley Collins which is also brilliant, with a strange layer of quite traditional English folk singing from Shirley Collins, with Davy Graham mixing all sorts of guitar noises underneath.
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Helpfully, someone has put the whole thing on Youtube:
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