I’m getting a big kick out of the comments on my Speedies/Student Teachers post from a few days ago, and I expect my blogging will be kind of focused on that for a while, plus I have to admit that I’m having trouble concentrating on much of anything this evening with the news from the Gulf states turning terrifying again (I have friends and acquaintances down that way, and I’m worried as hell about them). But nonetheless—and tying in to the universe’s apparent ongoing effort to keep me somewhere between 1978 and 1981—I need to write just briefly about the Sandy Denny boxed set that arrived in the mail yesterday.
It’s my second Sandy box (this one is “Boxful of Treasures,” which repeats a fair amount of what’s on the box I already owned, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” but also includes a lot of demos and home recordings and alternate takes, and I’m a sucker for that kind of thing), which is maybe a little self-indulgent, but I got it for a “good” price (brand new, still shrink-wrapped, not a promo, for $70 instead of the $100+ that most retailers wanted for it), and I was feeling sorry for myself last week, so I ordered it. It arrived yesterday, and I posted about it on one of the music e-mail lists that I’m on, but that wasn’t really the appropriate venue for it—not too many fans over there, or probably even people who know who she was. So I’m going to do something I don’t normally do: crib part of the post from that list and repost it here, with some edits and rewrites.
I guess if I’d made a concerted effort to compare the track listing side by side with that of the other Sandy
box, I’d have realized that there was a lot of overlap between the two, and maybe I wouldn’t have bought it. But then again, as soon as I started reading the liner notes, I thought, “Fuck that.” Richard
Thompson’s introduction alone was worth the money.
I’ve posted about Sandy here on the blog in the past, but this year, I finally came to the conclusion, after years of wavering about whether I could make such a strong statement, that she was simply the greatest singer I’ve ever heard. (That’s opinion–I’m not attempting to state it as fact, so I hope no one will
attack me for it.) Her songwriting was always interesting and occasionally brilliant, and of course, she was an essential part of the revival/modernization of British Isles traditional music. Her death, at the age of just 31, was close to inevitable, and was the result of damage she’d knowingly done to herself, but it was
nonetheless tragic, especially when you consider how much more she might have contributed. Several quotes in the liner notes from those who knew her express surprise and even bitterness that she hasn’t
received the same sort of cult adulation that Nick Drake received, and though I think it’s a little strange to be bitter about something like that, I also see the point (though I’m also a member of the cult of Nick, certainly; that’s a post for another day too). She was extraordinary (as a singer, but also apparently as a human being, according to those who knew her), and irreplaceable.
And mostly, for me at least, it was that voice: breathy (I’ve always said that she sang kind of the way Bette Davis talked), but in no way wispy or ethereal; on the contrary, she was a magnificently powerful singer with extraordinary command and control of her voice, a wonderful sense of dynamics and phrasing, and just the most beautiful, awe-inspiring tone and timbre I’ve ever heard. I can sing some (not so well as I used to, since I’m an old broad and haven’t sung as regularly as I’ve gotten older as I used to), and from the very first time I heard Sandy sing, I tried to model my voice after hers. Doing so improved my phrasing and some other aspects of my singing…but I could never actually sound like Sandy; no one ever did or could. (Wanna see me get really, really mad? Find one of the several reviews from the late 1980s of one of Syd Straw’s records that compared her voice to Sandy’s. Yeah.) There are a lot of female singers in the trad-folk/Brit/Celtic tradition that I admire and adore, from Niamh Parsons’s wonderful dusky contralto to Karan Casey’s miraculous, airy, tripping soprano to Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh’s (hey, first time I’ve ever spelled that right without having to look it up first!) canonically gorgeous and sweet high soprano to Kate Rusby’s modernized version of a great traditional British voice, and more. But when you get right down to it, none of them can touch Sandy: she was the greatest, period.
I started crying as soon as I opened the box and looked at the photo on the booklet cover: an older Sandy (as old as she got, anyway), looking dissipated and world-weary and a little bit lost. Not the photo I’d
have chosen, probably, but an honest one, at least. I’ve always half-wondered (and I’m not the only one) how different her career and life might have been if she had been beautiful and sexy instead of
sweet-faced and dumpy…though that’s speculation for another day.
The first thing I listened to from the box was “The Pond and the Stream,” one of my favorite songs that Sandy wrote. She wrote it about the far more obscure singer Anne Briggs, who was a huge influence on Sandy and other Brit-trad female singers of the time, like Maddy Prior and Linda Thompson. (I didn’t
know about Briggs until this year, I’m embarrassed to say, and I’ve been meaning to have a word with my Lancastrian/Mancunian friend Ged about how he could allow this ignorance of mine to exist. But I’ve made up for it since then.)
When Sandy died in horrible, stupidly unnecessary circumstances in 1978, I was, coincidentally, experiencing my first (and still worst) major depression, and her death hit me especially hard, almost like the death of a friend. I still have the journal entry I wrote about it at the time, though I won’t post it here—there are some limits to how confessional even I’m willing to get. But now that I’m watching “Butterflies” again (and the first season of “The Muppet Show”! Another blast from my past), and since, as noted, the universe seems to want me to revisit my late teen years, I find myself mourning her again. Then again, in some sense, I never really stopped. Every time I hear her sing—that voice, my God, that voice—I mourn her all over again.