Sandy Denny 1947-1978
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Album:The Original Sandy Denny
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Almax (MOGger of old) is currently "between homes", hence his absence from here, but he still posts on his own private blog (there is a good reason why it's private, incidentally). He's just posted about Fairport Convention's "Unhalfbricking", and I notice that "Who Knows Where The Time Goes" off that LP remains only a yellow button from over two years ago here.
The song was written and sung by the brilliant yet insecure Sandy Denny, who obsessed about her looks and weight after some fairly sexist jibes in the press, and both smoked and drank to excess. She died after a fall at her home, aged 31. While most sources attribute this to her uncontrollable drinking (her husband had left her and taken their child due to her erratic behaviour), some say that this in fact masked the fact that she suffered from a cancerous tumour on the brain. Wherever the truth lies, she died too young and deserves to be more remembered than she is today.
While I send my dwarves off to hunt out the means to rectify the absence ofa full length version of "WKWTTG" from here, here is Britain's finest ever folk singer, from her pre-Fairport solo LP "The Original Sandy Denny", performing Tom Paxton's "My Ramblin' Boy".
Comments (11)
And here it is, from "Unhalfbricking" in 1969, Sandy Denny singing with Fairport Convention, with Richard Thompson on lead guitar, performing the original of the much covered "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?"
If this doesn't affect your heart, then I suspect you are already dead.
It affected my heart, so I'm not dead yet. I had never heard either before, so with them checked off, now I can die happy. I wish I had been there to catch her a she fell.
"The North Star Grassman and the Ravens" is still, for me, one of the criminally undercelebrated records of the early Seventies. Perhaps she's due the same sort of reappraisal that Judee Sill (another tragic figure) received several years ago...
As a lonely Judee Sill fan, I wonder who reappraised her, and where?
I loved both Sill's albums when they originally came out in the early Seventies and could never understand why she was never at least as famous as, say, Jackson Browne, given that her music was at least five times as interesting. Apparently, two or three years ago her first two albums were re-released on CD, and hipster adulation followed - for at least three months.
i passed the living test.. I just caught up with Richard Thompson again with his work for the film"Grizzly Man"..
Chris M
Hipster adulation; I want to be part of that.
Didn't Gordon Lightfoot write Who Knows? Anyway, Richard Thompson and the other musicians are magnificent in accompanying the great Ms. Denny--kind of reminds me of Nels Cline burning quietly in the background on the recent Wilco number, "Either Way". On the other hand, I wasn't knocked out by Vashti Bunyan... Thanks for the post.
Always credited as a Sandy Denny song - it has that Sixties almost optimistic innocence, despite the subject matter, that it's nigh on impossible to recapture in this cynical age where everybody posts their innermost thoughts for posterity, despite the utter banality of 99.5% of their insights
BerkeleyBob says:
Didn't Gordon Lightfoot write Who Knows?
Hardly. It was something like the second song Sandy ever wrote, and she was like eighteen at the time.
I'd forgotten it was thirty years ago that i was sitting in a laundromat in Marietta GA and reading Rolling Stone and i hit a tiny item in the "stop press" box that said Sandy had stepped on a rainbow...
In 1990 and 1992, when i was over for Cropredy, i visited Sandy's grave in Putney Vale. In '92, i left a white rose.
While i love Who Knows..., i prefer Take Away the Load (recorded as "Sandy's Song" by Fairport on Gottle o' Geer; while Sandy did record it herself, this version's resonances make it more poignant)
and perhaps White Dress on Rising for the Moon.
Scary to think, BTW, that Gottle came out in 1976 - it almost sounds like a eulogy for Sandy...