The iconic British folk guitarist that Richard Thompson claims is the “original guitar hero”
Of the most influential guitar players of all time, heavyweights like Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix often get the first mentions. But there’s one guitarist who’s somewhat unsung by comparison, and was so influential, in fact, that folk-rock guitarist Richard Thompson calls “the original guitar hero”.
And that’s Davey Graham, the late veteran British guitarist and folk-rock revivalist, credited with popularising DADGAD tuning, among many other accolades.
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“He was a great player, and a great pioneer who took from everything,” Thompson explains in a new interview with Uncut. “He knew enough jazz, North African music, traditional music, Caribbean music, it’s all in there, and if you went to visit him he’d switch from one to the other, like, ‘Have you heard this one? But what about this?’ He was the first. After him comes Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Martin Carthy, then John Martyn et cetera.”
Though he had a lasting impact on the guitar world, Davey Graham wasn’t without his struggles. In an interview last year, folk legend Martin Carthy spoke of Graham’s battle with heroin addiction, recalling the first time he dabbled in the hard substance and how it affected his creative ability.
“I thought I’d done a really good job, but when I put the record on, I went: ‘What the fuck is that?!’ It was absolutely terrible. I was playing this solo that was nonsense,” Carthy remembered of the pair re-recording a version of Port Mahon, originally written by Sydney Carter.
He went on: “On the way home from that session, Davey told me that he’d had his first fix the night before: ‘Oh, it was great, I’m going to do it again.’”
Continuing in the new interview with Uncut, Richard Thompson says: “One does not judge. People have to get through life, and sometimes you need a bit of fortification to do so.”
Thompson himself is a lifelong teetotaller, a decision he says he made at a “fork in the road” in the 1970s.
“If you’re in the music community you see a lot of damage, you see a lot of people die young,” he says. “In the ‘70s I saw a fork in the road, and I can go this way and I’ll be dead in, you know, seven years, and if I go this way, I might survive. It was a conscious choice.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
