Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Born in Leicestershire to a Scottish father and a Guyanan mother, Davy Graham became an eternal itinerant, moving between the folk clubs of London’s Soho and the shores of the Mediterranean. In his prime he was one of the British folk revival’s great innovators, broadening palettes and expanding minds. Cherry Tree’s eight-disc collection traces his influence — but also tracks his sad decline. It opens with 1961’s “Angi”, Graham’s intricate folk-blues instrumental covered by everyone from Bert Jansch to Paul Simon. Two years later he would release his debut studio album, The Guitar Player, a set of instrumental blues and jazz covers that made “Angi”’s originality sound like a flash in the pan. His second record, Folk, Blues And Beyond, with its mixture of traditional folk and Middle Eastern influences, is much better, save for a low-energy “Cocaine” and an ill-advised “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”.Graham’s 1965 composition “Maajun (A Taste Of Tangier)” charts a future direction ready to be explored by British folk musicians; “Sally Free And Easy”, “Black Is The Colour Of My True Love’s Hair” and “Seven Gypsies” see him essentially inventing Pentangle a couple of years early.The masterpiece here is Folk Roots, New Routes, his 1964 collaboration with Shirley Collins. Neither have ever been better. Collins had already recorded “Hares On The Mountain” on her 1959 debut, Sweet England, accompanying herself on the banjo, but here Graham’s guitar makes the song extraordinary: it flirts and struts, and then as Collins’s incantations become weirder he opens up space for her. Readings of “Reynardine” and “Pretty Saro” make full use of his new modal tunings.After that, heroin and poor choices take their toll: boiled-down ragas are great, as is a fidgety, ebullient “Both Sides Now”, but his jazz covers never match the bebop masters he copies, and there is too much Lennon-McCartney. The last two albums here, recorded with his wife Holly, are fine, but by the end of the 1960s Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Trees and countless others are forging ahead on the trail he once blazed.★★★★☆‘He Moved Through The Fair: The Complete 1960s Recordings’ is released by Cherry Tree
