Anne Briggs

Anne Briggs (TOPIC, 2019, CD) 

Anne Briggs was one of the most influential figures on the 60s folk scene. Often mythologised in biographies of friends like Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson, her free spirit still resonates on disc years after she retired from performance. 

Though she began under Ewan MacColl’s protective (left-)wing, her uncomplicated delivery, often unaccompanied, free of vibrato or emotional affectation, set a benchmark for traditional singing among her contemporaries, the younger folkies.

So this is a welcome reissue, to mark the 80th anniversary of Topic Records, of her first full-length LP. Originally produced by mentor A.L. Lloyd, with Johnny Moynihan of Sweeney’s Men sharing bouzouki duties on one track, it sounds as fresh and lucid now as it did in 1971.

Here are definitive presentations of songs like ‘Blackwater Side’, ‘Willie O’Winsbury’, ’The Cuckoo’ and ‘Reynardine’. Helpful sleeve notes by RnR’s Ken Hunt fill in the pre-history of these classics and remind us of Briggs’s importance for successors like June Tabor and Emily Portman. Writing of later treatments of ‘Blackwater Side’, Hunt laconically observes: “Led Zeppelin made a different meal of it”. Indeed they did — which just shows how versatile such ingredients can be in creative hands.*

[Review first published in RnR 74]

[*Before anyone points out that Led Zeppelin I was released in 1969, let it not be forgotten that Jimmy Page learned this tune via Bert Jansch, who had recorded it on his 1966 album Jack Orion. Jansch, in turn, had learned it from Anne Briggs, who had been singing it for years before she committed it to vinyl in 1971.]