(Written 28/6/15)
Just been playing the John Renbourn tracks I have on the iPlayer, and his perfect version of "Lord Franklin" came on. You know how some music can drag you back to a certain time and place? Well, "Lord Franklin" delivered in spades, with VAT added and fries to go, because it took me back to two times and places.
The first was in the early 70's, when I was just learning the guitar and soaking up influences wherever I could, then repeatedly failing to reproduce them on the nylon-strung acoustic that was the only guitar I had - and that was on loan from school. A similarly pimpled guitar-playing friend recommended Mr Renbourn for advanced bemusement and envy, so I bought "The John Renbourn Sampler" for what was, even then, a bargain price of 99p. Bear in mind that I was a very new guitarist and I knew nothing about tunings, so trying to play even a bar of what JR was smoothly delivering left me with a broken finger, hand, string and guitar.
"Lord Franklin", though, stood out. Great tune, interesting lyrics and that strangled electric solo... it was the song I came back to time after time. What's more, I learnt to play it. Very slowly, over several years, and nothing like the Renbourn version, but the song relies on the three chord trick of E, A and then B. Mind, B is a bloody difficult chord to play, so I used C, D and G. Which led me to the art of transposition. Later on, someone showed me how to play the B chord as a barred E shape at the seventh fret (E transposed by seven semitones is a B) and that other chords could be played with a barred E shape, with interesting results. E at the third fret is G. At the fifth, it's A. At the tenth, it's D.
Even better, at the ninth, it's C sharp, a fiendishly difficult chord. B flat is another chord straight from Satan's bottom for the new guitarist with a cheap instrument and finger difficulties... until someone tells you that it's a barred E at the sixth fret.
So there I was, transposing and barring for quite some time, playing "Lord Franklin" in any key you like and playing many other songs, too in any key I liked. And then another pal said " Try removing the bar for A at the fifth and B at the seventh."
Good Lord! Just put an E shape above the fifth, or the seventh and it all works! Bonus - it sounds a bit folky, too. So there's me trying out all the three chord trick songs to see which ones worked and sounded a bit folky, too... and I discovered Led Zep's "Rock'n'Roll". I played it to Colin, he said "Cor!" and we recorded it. Yes, a folky "Rock'n'Roll" on a couple of acoustic guitars, recorded in my kitchen - and it was one of the tracks picked for Colin's memorial album.
"Lord Franklin", once transposed, now played without the bar at the root, the fifth and the seventh, was coming on quite nicely.
Then some kind soul lent me a guitar at a jam session in Winchester one night, saying "It's in D. You know how to play in D, right?" I confessed that he might as well have been speaking in Tagalog and could have handed me a herring, so little did I understand his meaning. He cheerfully demonstrated that the guitar was in a non-standard tuning, but that many familiar chords could be played with fewer fingers than usual, leaving the others free to hit some interesting frets, meaning that the digit-destroying C sharp flattened ninth swam into my orbit. Making a note of how to tune the guitar (by now, a steel-strung Eko Ranger 6 jumbo), I probably bored my then partner Karen stupid running through the songs I knew that worked really quite well in this new world of "tunings".And yes, "Lord Franklin" sounded softly mysterious, folky and on the edge of professionalism when played in a D tuning with spare fingers on interesting frets.
Need I add that once transposing, barring, not barring but just moving chord shapes up and down the fretboard and non-standard tuning were under my belt, the Richard Thompson songbook opened up in front of me? As did quite a lot of John Martyn's work (without that Echoplex, or those pedals, obviously).
"American Pie" taught me how to play the guitar. "Lord Franklin" took me from basic pimply Girl Guide chords to supporting Johnny Coppin when he played Winchester Folk Club and some excitable people asking me whether I might play "Anji" for them. (Absolutely no chance, I left that sort of thing to Colin.) With a bit of retuning, though, I did play "Solid Air" that night. There's only three chords to it, after all, and two of them are one-finger bars, leaving more fingers to hammer on interesting frets - like John Martyn did, to confuse the new guitarist and camouflage how easy it is to play.
Going back to the early 70's though, I was intrigued by the tale told through the lyrics of "Lord Franklin" and wanted to know more about him. Now then, younger people, we had none of your modern Internet, no world wide web, and computers were both very large and attended by white-coated scientists. The concept of owning a computer in the home for my school friends and I was banjaxed at the first hurdle, viz. there was no way your mum would buy you a white coat without a significant improvement in your science grades. So any research had to be done using the quaint old-fashioned building known as a "library" and a search engine known as "a librarian".
I was fascinated by the history I found, of an adventurer setting off to find what would become the North West Passage over the top of Canada, his ship being ice-bound, how the crew set off walking to where they thought land was, taking some really odd things with them like a desk because they were all nuts from eating canned food contaminated by lead, how none of them survived or was even found, how more people were killed in the search for them than were in the original crew - honestly, if I played "Lord Franklin" on stage, the intro lasted longer than the song.
As for the second time the song took me back to, it was a year after FolkCast started, and I had just completed the last Folk Calendar of traditional events. "Any ideas about what you want to do now?" said FolkCast originator Phil Widdows... and "Lord Franklin" appeared on the horizon, hailing me across the icy seas. "Well, I could have a chat about the history behind some folk songs. Like 'Lord Franklin', for example. Did you know that...." After a few more hastily-cobbled together examples, "Parcel of Rogues" and "Fighting For Strangers" (I think), Widds was sold on the idea.
Thus was "Story Behind The Song" born. The very first one was "Lord Franklin". I privately thought there might be a dozen songs at best that would fit the slot. I didn't count on listeners suggestions, people writing songs aimed at a Story Behind The Song airing, being able to commission songwriters like Carys and Roy Mette to compose songs about major events (the Gunpowder Plot and the Fire of London) from which no songs survive, and I certainly didn't think I'd write nearly ninety Stories - ably abetted by top producer and soundscape artist extraordinaire Phil Widdows.
"Lord Franklin" has taken me from hopeful plank-spanker to supporting a folk artist I'd previously paid folding money to see many times with his old band, Decameron and solo, too. It's also taken me into the reflected glory of FolkCast, invitations to Cropredy as a guest of Fairport Convention with full backstage privileges, free passes, food and chalets at Butlins Folk Festival... and being greeted warmly by the Godfather of British folk/rock, "The Guv'nor" Ashley Hutchings with the words "I'm a big fan of Babba!" Gaw...
Really, that's not too bad for a single John Renbourn track!
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