TalkAwhile - The Folk Corporation Forum

ok, so today jonesy bought me my first copy of 'leige and leaf', and i have played it twice.
now i like fC, would consider myself a fan, but not an authority.

so this is where the name of the thread comes into play.

i lke it.
i like it a lot.
it will be oft played here at groove towers.
but most influential?
dunno.
we are now playing blonde on blonde (dylan) which in jonesy's opinion should be the ' most influential' folk album.
but i pointed out that that is US folk, folk with inverted commas, and not traditional by any means, but following on from the beatnik revolution.
surely US folk music would have its roots in country?
i can only speak for myself, but i would rather listen to blonde on blonde than leige and leaf.
(cue rotten tomatoes)
but maybe its my age?
i am 32, therefore l&l can not have had an influence on me in its heyday, but b on b cant have influenced me either?

how much of this is jumping on the bandwagon, and retrospect, and fondness of what is no more?
there are other fc albums that i would listen to first.


i know its a 'get yer coat' moment, but its a question rather than a rant.

(please do not throw heavy objects at me, it was intended to be a discussion point and the 'start an argument' room has disappeared)


keen to hear real reasons why (historically) this should be the 'most influential' folk album, in terms of musical climate, lineage, times and other stuff available(nick drake? barrett? was there anyone else about?).

please dont throw rotten eggs at us, its a question not an opinion.

we are part of the levellers generation......

look you bugger im just off to my bed and i see this

 whilst L&L and BoB might not be a direct influence on your bad self
its the all pervading influence that they have had since release
its the ripples on a pond school of thought, on first release theres the immediate impact of the record
and over time its peop;e influenced by something that was influenced by L&L and so on to infinity after the passing of 37 years
certainly fairport would have had a hugely different career, if, after the car crash they had decided on a different career move
Swarb for one would not have been involved, and i bet that by now they would have been a short lived footnote in british psychedelia
fondly remembered by a few, a bit like, say,caravan or principal edwards magic theatre
 the Zim however made groundbreaking records before BoB and has made more since and his influence is in the very air we breathe today
 say he.d been killed in the motorbike accident, he would still be the ghost at just about every table, think Nick Drake times a couple of billion
  look im off to bed let some other insomniac or colonial take you to task over your post  ;)

Let me hoist a timorous flag in support, up to a point.  I don't dispute that L&L may well be the most influential folk album of them all, but of early FC it isn't my favourite or most played, and I write as someone who bought each of the first five albums as they came out, so a real fan from the 60s, starting with the first with our own immortal St Jude on lead - it was John Peel playing Chelsea Morning that set it all going for me.

WWDOOH with its potent mix of covers, band-penned and trad always strikes me as the best balance of them all, and Unhalfbricking, especially A Sailor's Life, has the same excitement as the premonitory rumblings of the first parts of Beethoven's Ninth.  To me it's the most interesting album as it marks the transition, the first tentative steps.  Also the band lost something significant vocally when Iain Matthews left.  L&L is the first full-on trad album, even the self-penned songs have that feel.  So for me it shouldn't be about choosing one album or another - the first five, including Full House, are all steps along the same journey.  If you took some of Unhalfbricking and half of L&L and chucked in She Moved through the Fair and Nottamun Town from WWDOOH you'd be about right.

And Blonde on Blonde is great, but Dylan's real masterpiece is Blood on the Tracks. (Discuss)

Liege and Lief may not be the best Fairport album but it is definitely the most influential by far. It is also probably the most consistent in sound and vision of all the early albums. A conscious effort to move away from the earlier American influences and concentrate on an English sound.

You cannott dispute it's influence on English music at the time and to this day, it was probably the direct cause of many an addled hippy plugging their violin in and letting loose. Without Liege and Lief there probably would have been no Steeleye Span or Oysterband and Zeppelin would probably have not looked beyond the blues for inspiration. It's influence goes beyond folk and reverberates through English music in many ways.

It would be more appropriate to compare it's influence to that of the Band's Big Pink album not Blonde on Blonde. Although all three albums stand to this day as testimony to the genius of their creators.

It does sound a bit polite these days though.

Now the best Fairport album is without a doubt Nine, and there is many an American influence on there. So I guess it all came around again.

I have to agree with Neil, L&L is by far the most influential English Folk Album. Its key accomplishment was the moving of the folk revival into the mainstream. Whilst many FC fans would not choose it as their favourite FC album, I would wager that it is the only album most non-FC fans have heard of.

Where it stands today in relation to the early gems in the Zim's oeuvre, I wouldn't like to say, but in the 60s and 70s in the Uk, I would say it was probably more influential. As has been noted, some big, big names can be ticked off as having been influenced by it!

How many other listeners discovered "traditional" music and folk customs as a result of Liege & Lief? Perhaps that's a measure of it's influence as well.

I'd go along with Neil and Mark. Definintely the most influential English folk album of all time. Whether it's a favourite or not is a different question. I wasn't quite as early a starter as David, my first purchase was WWDOOH, but at the time I was also listening to a lot of folk music. (Ian Campbell, Robin Hall & Jimmy McGregor, Rory & Alex McEwan). What was noticable though, was that most of my contemporaries weren't. After Liege and Leif that noticably changed. It led to a huge reawakening of interest in folk music, in a way that not even Dylan seems to have achieved.

So definitely the most influential, and I like it a lot, but  no way could I choose a favourite out of thefirst five.

Without L and L there would almost certainly have been no Steeleye Span, no Albion Band, no Morris On, no Fotheringay, no Home Service, and Richard Thompson's work would probably have developed in an entirely different way. It's possible that the "folk" tracks on Led Zeppelin IV would have had an entirely different feel. East of Eden might never have had a hit with "Jig a Jig". Thousands of young musicians who previously wouldn't have even heard a traditional tune suddenly discovered it was cool and started putting rock rhythms behind folk music. Alan Stivell might never have formed his electric band (listen to "Chemins de Terre" and hear how he actually quotes musically from "Matty Groves"). Later bands like Oysterband, The Levellers, The Men They Couldn't Hang, even the Pogues, The Eighteenth Day of May, and musicians like Jim Moray all have some descent from that album.

It was (as Martin Carthy described Folk Roots, New Routes) a Great Leap Forward. No one had ever done anything quite like it before - not a whole album. Forty Minutes of music that created a genre.

Might not sound that revolutionary now - but imagine placing that needle on the disc when there had been nothing like it before.

thanks for those replies folks, and not a rotten egg in sight!

Here's your answer...."the first (literally) British folk rock LP ever". That's why it's influential. Everything that came after was directly influenced by those two sides of black plastic - surely the true meaning of the word "influential", it's not just a self-contained album, but something that started a whole genre. "Influential" has almost become a synonym for "favourite" with these endless magazine polls, where some gormless student's heard half a dozen albums and votes for 'OK Computer' but that's what it really means.

It's worth bearing in mind the meaning of the term "folk-rock" (in it's British sense) as well. Nick Drake etc aren't (British) folk-rock - it basically means the fusion of traditional folk music with rock, the template Fairport set with 'L&L'.

I wouldn't say it's my favourite Fairport album either, partly due to personal taste, and also over-exposure I suppose. But every now and again I can put it on & still here that freshness - the same excitement that a lot of the 70s albums had, that feeling that everything was being done for the first time. Steeleye, 'Morris On', the Albion Band on 'Battle of the Field' and 'Rise Up Like The Sun', the Home Service 'Alright Jack'.

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i am beginning to see what i could not have known having not been around when it was released - the knock on effect the album had rather than its stand alone brilliance.
thanks!

Context is all. There are many influential albums and songs that sound fairly tame these days, because we're all used to them and their progeny. Another example: Sgt. Pepper was described to me the other day as "just another concept album". Hah!

Big subject which, I think, is more to do with the continuity of FC than the tracks involved although there are only two completely newly written non-trad.arr tracks (Farewell, Farewell is Willy o' Winsbury with new words).

If they had not re-grouped post the accident and done something as ground-breaking as L & L, English folk and its influences would have dropped back into the clubs with their limitations on amplification. Students, who formed one of the main cores of FC support, would have picked up on some other aspect of USA influenced music or else followed the derivations of Pink Floyd and other prog type music (not knocking that).

Would Jethro Tull have developed the way they did? I don't suggest I  know the answer to that.

Certainly a 'genre' would not have existed. Listen to Mike Harding on Wednesdays and think of the variety of styles he has available. Folk on the radio in the late 60's used to be what you could hear any night in a folk club (Tom Paxton or Bob songs and some utterly cringemaking home-made CND type songs) and nothing else English. (not knocking the USA).


Good on yer, Groovy, for starting such a philosophical thread :) :)

I agree that L&L is probably the most influential - although the 'Status Quo with a fiddle' sound of tracks like Come All Ye and Medley has sometimes grated on me over the years, I still think its a great album that has stayed with me.

I wouldn't agree with the 'without it no folk rock, no continuation of 'traditional' songs' sort of argument.

Pentangle would have existed without L&L - and I think the 'people who once lived with Bert Jansch' stream of musicians like the Incredible String Band or Donovan would have still done their thing.  I also think Nick Drake was more influenced by Bert Jansch than FC (hence his covers of Courting Blues and Strolling Down the Highway). 

Furthermore, I don't think L&L influenced Led Zepplin to do folkie stuff - Sandy Denny new Plant and Page before she was in FC and given that White Summer on the Yardbird's Little Games is a rip off of Davey Graham's She Moved thro the Bizarre and page idolized Bert Jansch (so much that he couldn't be bothered to credit him for BMS) I think Zep would done the folk stuff anyway. 

here is what is about this album on the fairport website:-

"With Liege & Lief, Fairport had invented British folk-rock in spectacular style. It was a milestone album for them, and an inspiration for many others."

It was a milestone album, it an inspiration for many others, but did they invent British Folk Rock?
Not in book they didn't. The Animals 'House of the rising sun" pre-dates this by 4 years. This was a traditional song with a rock arrangement. Also this was the song that caused Dylan to go electric.

From Rob

I agree with that, but it was L&L that moved traditional music out of the folk clubs and into the wider public conciousness. Fairport lent credibility to the folk movement in the eyes of the younger generations - they made folk "cool" 8)

Ah yes, There is a House in New Maldon they call the Rising Sun.

Surely for it to be British folk-rock the songs needs to be british rather than the musicians, otherwise its Bris playing American folk rock?

Jackdaw

It is also an AMERICAN folk song. Nothing to do with the English/British folk explosion of the L&L period.

(You beat me to it JD!)

just a point,
 pentangle never ever rocked
they folked and they jazzed but no rocking
 fact of the matter is that liege and lief got there first, so every thing else is derivative
 zep may well have had a go as page was well into bert, but it would have been 3 years laterthan l&l
 and i cant see them as the leaders of any subsequent folk rock boom

blood on the tracks- no question its bobs best, but the mid 60's trilogy of bringing it all back home, highway 61 and BoB wernt too shabby

 the animals were a blues rock(r&b) band doing an old blues song, not folk

Aye, as Jackdaw, Mark and Jim have said, "British folk-rock" means the material....not the musicians. Blues-rock is a similar thing though, but I think it was much more of a logical thing to add electricity to the blues, a lot of the older blues artists readily accepted it and were at the forefront, whereas the British folk scene was very much against the rocking up of "their" music (it wasn't theirs at all of course but that's a different thread entirely...).

I think the problem is that lots of stuff that obviously isn't (British) folk-rock tends to get lumped in - people throwing in Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Pentangle...Dylan?! Maybe the genre should have been given a better title, although I think it suits the sort of thing Fairport patented (literally folk mixed with rock) better than it does the singer-songwritery style it keeps getting applied to.

Does the fact that the tune to Matty Groves is an adaptation of an American old time tune (Shady Grove) with the Scottish version of an English folk song make it Anglo-Brittano folk-rockgrass  ;D 

I know there was a long thread on this but I think labouring the Britishness of things is always on shaky grounds as so much of the British 'traditional' music of the folk revial comes from songs rediscovered in America.  Songs like Nottamun Town or Pretty Polly all come from England originally in various forms but re-arrived to the UK via an Appalachian vacation, so i'm not sure the Atlantic is a good way to make distinctions as to what is what.

 

there is something in what you say, but I think the general point is that the lyric for "House of the Rising Sun" (There is a house in New Orleans) pretty much excludes it from the genre of British Folk Rock.

I know what you mean Curt, it all gets a bit complicated, but I think you can still draw a distinction there. Despite some of the songs having been rediscovered in America - in fact a lot of the trad songs were collected in the various colonies - they're still British songs. We were distinguishing between blues songs which don't originate from Britain so you can differentiate between them

Oh this is very interesting, thanks Groovy  ;D

It helps to have these discussions so that people like me, who are only here at all because of L&L, can catch up on what we wished we'd learned when we were younger.

Grew up with Zep, Genesis, Tull, Trex, Joni Mitchel and Van Morrison but didn't really 'cross over' until I bought L&L 3 years ago...  and have been going to FC gigs and Cropredy ever since..

Aaaahh  :)
Issy  {:-)

How about the instrumental medley? As I think Ashely Hutchings pointed out on 'It All Comes Round Again', there was absolutely no precedent for electric jigs and reels. You could view 'Folk Roots, New Routes', Pentangle, The Animals, Dylan/Band etc as influencing/pre-empting the electric arrangements of Matty Groves, Reynardine and so on, but where are the bands/records that influenced the Lark in the Morning medley?

BTW I'm a bit of a newbie. Hello!

thats almost the opposite for me - have been into rock since forever, and gradually moved toward folk, and until yestarday i had never heard l&l, although i was familiar with some of the tracks.
having read the whole thread, i wont disput its influence on the genre in general, or on certain individuals, and maybe i do have to thank FC fot the fact that the levs are here at all, but l&l remains un influential to me personally.
had it been my introduction to folk rock, the story may be different, but its preaching to the converted to me!

I believe the tune of "House of the Rising Sun" was taken from a traditional 17th century British folk melody.
I think it was played in the US as a blues song and a folk song. Then in 1964 the Animals produced a folk rock version of it. i.e a traditional song with a rock arrangement.

My main point was that the Genre Folk Rock had been around for a while and maybe Fairport embellished it and stuck the word British on the front end, they still invented nothing new.

From Rob

Ironically the tune to House of the Rising Sun was (according to Alan Lomax) a setting for Lady Barnard and Little Musgrave - the forerunner of Matty Groves.

Surely the question is was the album influential in the progression of folk rock, not what was the first folk rock song. House of the Rising Sun was an anomaly when compared to the rest of the Animals output. It was influenced by Dylan went on to influence Dylan and then became a regular on the best of the sixties compilations. Not a groundbreaking statement of a new direction for the band.

Many of the tunes used for British folk songs are also found (used for totally different songs) in other countries - Germany, the Balkans etc. That doesn't change the fact that the British song is British. Similarly the fact that 'House of the Rising Sun' is perhaps based on a British tune does not make the song a British one. Quite a few Elvis songs were (musically) based on traditional songs, did Elvis start folk-rock?  ;)

Nobody's saying that Fairport weren't without their influences, mainly what The Band were doing to revitalise American "traditional" music, but you only need to look at which albums/bands came before, and then what came after. Pre-L&L there hadn't been a folk-rock album - again, in the sense we use the term, rather than the American version - after it there's been many. A genre called folk-rock had been around for a while, but it was something entirely different - the sort of thing lampooned in 'A Mighty Wind'.

My view exactly - which I've rattled on about ad nauseum for years. I refer to "trad-rock" to differentiate from all the other stuff - of course, nobody has a clue what I'm rabbiting on about - but then, there are those who think the Darkness are a rock band....................

Going off topic this, but does anybody else remember the fine "Principal Edwards Magic Theatre?"    Can maybe best described as arty theatrical folk rock; were considered to have influenced the early Genesis and Peter Gabriel with their bizzare stage costumes, songs or stories about Giant Hogweed taking over  Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove etc. Made a couple of great albums. Remember seeing them, in eh, Merthyr Tydfil, in around 1974. No disrespect to tre township of Merthyr, but they were always more deserving of greater places to play. Don't know what ever happened to them.

Yes I remember 'Principal Edwards', they were certainly around and about and playing everywhere when I lived near Portobello Rd, but my memory of what they did is very hazy (ummm as are most of my memories of that time!!! ::))

never heard of em

I always thought Richard thompson wrote this song? Did he just do the words? if so shouldn't the credit read Traditional / Thompson

From Rob

Jim,

Caravan were / are much more than just a footnote in British Psychedelia. They had there biggest album successes in the early seventies, split in the early eighties. but reformed with new members and more up to date sound in 1995 and have done tours around the world up to the present. Most recent album was in 2003 and are well worth seeing live if you get the chance.

From Rob

I suppose so, but as with most trad. tunes, they were only written down in the recent past, so variations must exist. I am no expert on copyright or what has to appear as credits, though.

" Principal Edwards etc" were on the Harvest label if my failing memory is correct?? I remember hearing some of their stuff on a sampler album - quite strange but quite good.

I have this album, but to be truthful I only play it for farewell, farewell and crazy man michael. I much prefer the 2 previous albums. they both have some cracking tracks especially Fotheringay, Autopsy, Meet on the ledge and Who knows where the time goes.  Magic!!!!

From Rob

Agree with that. L&L is a great album, but I always have preferred the earlier two; they had that more psychedelic, hard,darker, Americanised edge- Dylanesque and all that, but despite nationalistic sensitivities, do we need to worry about that? I don't think so. Listening to them now, they are evocative of stranger, but more hopeful, exciting and optimistic times.

I thought we all voted for L&L just so the guys could get an award? 

Some folks have talked about the Band influence and there were early comparisons with L&L to Big Pink.  I can't back this up, but it always seemed to me that Fairport was more likely following in the foot steps of the Byrds in creating a British version of SWEETHEARTS OF THE RODEO.  Ashley, himself, said that his vision revolved around creating a British counterpart to American C&W.  Also, although it was from an album after SWEETHEARTS, Fairport did record Ballad of Easy Rider during the L&L sessions.

Is SWEETHEARTS the most influential C&W record of all time?  Should it be considered even a C&W record at all?  Or, should it be considered an influential pop record?

I choose the latter because it changed pop music dramatically.  So much so, that it eventually changed C&W.

In this regard, therefore, L&L is not really a folk album at all.  Its a pop album.  It was intended for the pop charts and pop music buyers.  Neither the Byrds nor Fairport were interested in diving into the markets they were emulating. 

I hate seeing L&L stuck in the folk bends.  It don't belong there!  It belongs in the same bends as AMERICAN BEAUTY, DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, LONDON CALLING and NEVERMIND.

And that's how I feel about it.  :)

I agree.  Fairport were basically a rock band playing folk music.  Sandy Denny was a rock singer - and probably the greatest female rock singer of them all.

Oh, and I agree about Ian Matthews as well.  A brilliant vocalist who went on to show just how great he was on those 3 Matthews Southern Comfort LPs.

L&L is a great, great album though and I know it turned my Dad on to folk-rock when a university pal called Marcus played it to him for the first time.  Any album with Matty Groves, Tam Lin, and Crazy Man Michael on has to be a classic....

'I have criticisms of it [Liege & Lief], although if you ask anybody about the records they've made, they tend to see the warts...... But I do feel that on Liege and Lief we were too careful.  We could have been wilder.  But its influence was profound. I know people who took Liege & Lief as an example of what they could do within their own culture to revive their own traditional music.'

'Fairport played its first gig on the day Sgt. Pepper was released.  We played all the psychedelic clubs, so that was the context of the first couple of LPs.  But at some point we decided we wanted to be a lyric band and the people playing electric music with interesting lyrics were Dylan and The Byrds.....  It was a radical thing for Fairport to do - much harder than it was for Dylan, who was taking what was an American form anyway and connecting it with a bit of electricity...'

Richard Thompson, in the May 2006 issue of UNCUT.  Plenty more interesting stuff in the 2-page run through WWDOOH, L&L, I Want To See..., Shoot Out, Rumour and Sigh, and Front Parlour Ballads.

Wow - I thought L & L was pretty much sacrosant - surprised to see some negatives............................

Have to say that it is hard to do a critique of it now - it's a bit like giving a reason why you still like your best mate when he's a grumpy middle aged old git...........

It was a perfetly rounded album that touched a collective nerve. I knew that I loved traditional music, bt wasn't happy with the direction it was going and this album filled a huge gap. As a fledling drummer I was intrigued by what DM was doing. It's been perhaps bettered but it was incomparable on release. In that sense I suppose it's hard to arge that it wan't influential in that everything that came afterwards would be compared to it - as Joe Boyd said " genuine originality and bravery"

I thought they were on Dandelion (Peely's imprint) with the wonderful Bridget St John.

I knew Bridget St John when I was at Sheffield University. I was there 1965 to 1968 studying Chemistry, she was studying (if I remember correctly) French. That was, of course, before she was discovered by John Peel and dragged away to fame and fortune !!! In 1971 I moved to Northamptonshire and discovered the music of Principal Edwards Magic Theatre. A wonderful band - I still listen to their music lots. Bridget St John's, and very soon Principal Edwards, albums are being re-released on CD. Well worth getting...

Prnicipal Edwards? i'd second that. Still play their stuff now - on dated copied audio cassette tapes. Best way to describe them?- whimsical, arty folk rock stage-theatre band. A hybrid of early Genesis and Incredible String Band with bits of Steeleye and Fairport thrown in. Very underrated- never achieved the success they dserved. Also, something very magical and 60's optimistic alternative  and mystical about their music.

Not that it's a worth a hefty waft of Abramovitch's wallet, but 10/10 for getting the correct answer to this one. WWDOOH and Unhalfbricking are radically "new" "influential" sounds... L&L is too in its own way but against a background of The Band doing the same thing in a parallel universe, The Byrds continuing experimentation in folk/rock/rock'n roll... well I ask you... Is it that much more "seminal"... Maybe... Anyway my totally rational (nay obsessive - ed) view of WWDOOH as FC's GREATEST EVER BLOODY ALBUm seeks to provide a resonant harmonic to your post!

Willy O'Winsbury... old trad song... sung by Sweeney's Men a couple of years or so before FC did L&L... Gawd does anyone here remember Sweeney's Men.

yeah

I knew you'd know Jim! Are you attending Cropredy this year?

Anne Briggs was doing Willie of Winsbury in the folk clubs at the time (or so I am told)  [;-)

no ;)
 maybe next year though ,ifn the good lord's awillin and the creek dont rise

First I think Leaf and Leige is a great album and whatever music that has come out since doesn't change that. Whether Leaf and Leige is an influential album is very subjective. Some are going to feel it is and some aren't. It's all up to the person. Personally I couldn't careless if you find it influential or not. You're just one of 5 billion people on the planet and your opinion doesn't mean a thing to me or probably anyone else. I don't think it's a influential album except for the fact that I love it and think of it as a great album. I doubt even the artists find it a great influential album. It's just great music and influential or not nothing will change that.

A splendidly well-argued and exhaustive exegesis on the relativity of taste, the subjectivity of opinion and the inexorably increasing standard of the GCSE curriculum in the land of Milton , Shakespeare, Shelley and Lydon. I await the next critical examination of the influence of Bulgarian folk music on the development of Eastern European cultural mores with barely bated breath. Liege & Lief is, indeed, a fine album. Amen. That's all. Prayer optional. (Could you see me after the seminar, please?).