horrified his family by marrying an Anatolian Greek woman. He came to regret this union and, after a divorce, tried to pretend it had never produced a son.
In the early sixties Roy opened the legendary Howff in Edinburgh, a key venue in the early Festival ‘fringe’. He married Jill Doyle (sister of musician Davey Graham) but they soon arrived at an open arrangement. Her paramour, the Scottish folk singer Archie Fisher (now a presenter for BBC Scotland), came back to their third-floor flat on Bristow Place one night, found Jill’s bedroom door locked and a strange coat in the hallway, walked to the front window and jumped out. His fall was broken by her MG, conveniently parked outside with the top down and loaded with cushions. Archie only broke his arm, but the tabloids published photos of the squashed roadster amid lurid speculations about the ménage-à-combien ? Roy’s father wrote requesting that he no longer use the family name.
Roy moved to London and joined the Harold Davison Agency, where he developed a ‘folk and blues’ division. He and his mother – who wore black shawls and looked as if she had just stepped out of a village in Asia Minor – lived in adjacent flats near Cecil Sharp House, the centre of folk activities in London in the early sixties. In the spring of 1965, I returned to England to help Roy with a UK tour by the Reverend Gary Davis and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, filling the gap in my calendar and bank account until the Newport Festival preparations began in June. After Brixton Prison, I needed a place to stay, so Roy introduced me to Topic Records’ producer Bill Leader, who offered me his sofa.
During my winter in New York, I had attended a few recording sessions with Paul Rothchild, keeping the track listings, running errands and absorbing as much as I possibly could. Bill now became my mentor, and it would be hard to imagine a teacher more different from Rothchild. Paul’s records today sound expertly made: rich, full and three-dimensional. The same claims cannot always be made for Bill’s, but the performances are natural and spontaneous and the sound stands up well. In his Camden Town flat or a musician’s home, he would set up his two-track Revox, place the microphones in the liveliest room, nail blankets over the windows and make the musicians comfortable. His obvious love of the music and concern for the artists was something I never forgot. The hundreds of LPs Bill produced, from the ’50s through the ’70s, provide the backbone of any CD collection of British traditional music.
We set off for Tyneside one day in Bill’s Humber Super Snipe. I helped carry the equipment, kept track sheets and even snapped the cover photograph for an album by the Fisher Family, Scots living in Northumberland. Brother Archie being the one who had jumped from Roy Guest’s window, I was curious to hear his account. He shrugged and said, ‘I just had to get out of there and the window was closer than the door.’ The music was beautiful and the hospitality helped to prepare me for what I would encounter when I got to Scotland.
Travellers of both sexes in the early sixties thought nothing of hitch-hiking. Bill dropped me on the North Road outside Newcastle and a car stopped almost immediately. On the map I spotted a side road cutting across the lowland hills between the two main highways to Edinburgh with a village called Yarrow halfway along. The red line sported a green shadow, indicating ‘scenic’, so at Galashiels I made a song-inspired detour. A Boston folk singer named Robert L. Jones (whom I would invite that autumn to take over my job with George Wein and who would still be organizing George’s festivals and tours thirty-five years later) used to sing ‘The Dewy Dens O’ Yarrow’, a cheerful ditty with an eventful storyline. A Laird’s daughter elopes; her three brothers give chase; her hero kills two of the brothers but is treacherously slain from behind by the third; she rides
In the early sixties Roy opened the legendary Howff in Edinburgh, a key venue in the early Festival ‘fringe’. He married Jill Doyle (sister of musician Davey Graham) but they soon arrived at an open arrangement. Her paramour, the Scottish folk singer Archie Fisher (now a presenter for BBC Scotland), came back to their third-floor flat on Bristow Place one night, found Jill’s bedroom door locked and a strange coat in the hallway, walked to the front window and jumped out. His fall was broken by her MG, conveniently parked outside with the top down and loaded with cushions. Archie only broke his arm, but the tabloids published photos of the squashed roadster amid lurid speculations about the ménage-à-combien ? Roy’s father wrote requesting that he no longer use the family name.
Roy moved to London and joined the Harold Davison Agency, where he developed a ‘folk and blues’ division. He and his mother – who wore black shawls and looked as if she had just stepped out of a village in Asia Minor – lived in adjacent flats near Cecil Sharp House, the centre of folk activities in London in the early sixties. In the spring of 1965, I returned to England to help Roy with a UK tour by the Reverend Gary Davis and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, filling the gap in my calendar and bank account until the Newport Festival preparations began in June. After Brixton Prison, I needed a place to stay, so Roy introduced me to Topic Records’ producer Bill Leader, who offered me his sofa.
During my winter in New York, I had attended a few recording sessions with Paul Rothchild, keeping the track listings, running errands and absorbing as much as I possibly could. Bill now became my mentor, and it would be hard to imagine a teacher more different from Rothchild. Paul’s records today sound expertly made: rich, full and three-dimensional. The same claims cannot always be made for Bill’s, but the performances are natural and spontaneous and the sound stands up well. In his Camden Town flat or a musician’s home, he would set up his two-track Revox, place the microphones in the liveliest room, nail blankets over the windows and make the musicians comfortable. His obvious love of the music and concern for the artists was something I never forgot. The hundreds of LPs Bill produced, from the ’50s through the ’70s, provide the backbone of any CD collection of British traditional music.
We set off for Tyneside one day in Bill’s Humber Super Snipe. I helped carry the equipment, kept track sheets and even snapped the cover photograph for an album by the Fisher Family, Scots living in Northumberland. Brother Archie being the one who had jumped from Roy Guest’s window, I was curious to hear his account. He shrugged and said, ‘I just had to get out of there and the window was closer than the door.’ The music was beautiful and the hospitality helped to prepare me for what I would encounter when I got to Scotland.
Travellers of both sexes in the early sixties thought nothing of hitch-hiking. Bill dropped me on the North Road outside Newcastle and a car stopped almost immediately. On the map I spotted a side road cutting across the lowland hills between the two main highways to Edinburgh with a village called Yarrow halfway along. The red line sported a green shadow, indicating ‘scenic’, so at Galashiels I made a song-inspired detour. A Boston folk singer named Robert L. Jones (whom I would invite that autumn to take over my job with George Wein and who would still be organizing George’s festivals and tours thirty-five years later) used to sing ‘The Dewy Dens O’ Yarrow’, a cheerful ditty with an eventful storyline. A Laird’s daughter elopes; her three brothers give chase; her hero kills two of the brothers but is treacherously slain from behind by the third; she rides
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