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Anne Briggs

The Singer at the Gates of Dawn

In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit. Or so the story goes. And off to the west of Scotland, on the farthest shore of an island whose name shall remain discreet is a solitary, ancient and once ruinous cottage in a place which translates from Gaelic as ‘the pass of the hobgoblin’. Its new resident is not impressed: ‘I’m not really into hobgoblins,’ she says. ‘Not my scene at all.’

‘No – more Renbourn’s sort of thing,’ I suggest, dismounting with no small degree of discomfort from the back of the all-terrain vehicle that has brought us thus far, over the few roadless miles from the populated (26) side of the island to the home of Britain’s greatest and most adored traditional singer of the modern era (retired).

‘I’ll tell him you said that!’ she says, softening the mischievous jibe at once with a famously rakish grin, and manfully unpacking a trailer full of groceries, firewood and her visitor’s rain-racked belongings.

Anne Briggs: hard as the weather, soft as the sound of the ocean; the wandering siren of the British folksong revival, shunning company for months on end and intermittently making a handful of records that every other woman singer then and after would cherish as god-like inspiration. The first new-age traveller in history – but no fool for all this hippy claptrap.

Possessed of a voice that could take the listener into the world of the old songs themselves, the Anne Briggs of folk mythology was no fey romantic living out a fairytale. She was a born survivor, with no one and nothing to fall back on. Her young age, her strange attraction to what was then a certainly dying oral tradition and her singular personality meant that Anne Briggs was for so many others – Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny, June Tabor, Christy Moore, Richard Thompson, Dick Gaughan among them – the bridge. She made the whole thing credible and attainable. Not to put too fine a point on it she was, as was the best of the music itself, sexy, wild, mysterious, otherworldly and vulnerable all at the same time. ‘She was a rare thing/ Fine as a beeswing’ sang Richard Thompson, many years later in ‘Beeswing’, with its thinly veiled if romanticised story of a strange girl with a wolfhound triumphing over the confines of conventional living. This is the thing – rock ’n’ roll people wrote songs about her, but her own role models had absolutely nothing to do with rock ’n’ roll. ‘I had no interest in it,’ she says. ‘None whatsoever. My heroes were the nameless people who were recorded “in the field”. Their singing struck a deep chord within me and I immediately felt, That’s my music, that’s what I should be singing.’

The whole British folk revival, shadowy and peripheral as it seems today, is probably as much a contributor to the very sound of British rock as the earliest American blues and rock ’n’ roll, perhaps the classic lineage demonstration being the well-travelled story of ‘Black Mountain Side’ from the first Led Zeppelin album. Anybody who cares knows Jimmy Page got the thing from Bert Jansch’s take on the traditional ‘Blackwater Side’; Page once claimed he got it directly from seeing Anne in a folk club; Bert certainly got it from Anne – either way it all comes back to the same place. The analogy won’t stand too much scrutiny, but if British folk needs one single Robert Johnson figure, this defiantly reclusive woman who hasn’t seen a recording studio for 30 years is the closest it’s got. ‘There’s no neighbours for two miles in any direction,’ she says, ‘which is great. Suits me.’

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