All in the Downs by Shirley Collins

Author:Shirley Collins [Collins, Shirley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cultural studies; music; memoir; singer; history; folklore; folk music; English folksong; UK; Sussex; Britain
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2018-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Our life together was floundering and foundering over a thing that might appear petty: John loved jazz and I hated it. You wouldn't think that this could cause such a difference between us, but it did, and it was a crucial one. At first I tolerated Charlie Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker on the gramophone so much of the time… too much of the time. It simply wasn't music that I could understand, let alone enjoy, and I grew more and more intolerant simply watching John listen to it – the snapping fingers, the nodding head, the twitching legs and feet, the almost religious fervour of the light in his eyes. I'd always felt that jazz was alien to me; it belonged in dark clubs in the night-time, nothing of sunlight or fresh air or the outdoors. I minded the way jazz musicians dressed – silly pork-pie hats, and the way bass players leaned over their instruments, chewing their lips in rhythm to their playing; it made me squirm.

There were two occasions when I became so angry that I threw two full cups of coffee against the kitchen wall, and worse, when I dragged down the two heavy William Morris curtains from the big picture windows in the sitting room. Such acts leave you with far more clearing up and repairing than warrants the act in the first place – but I was enraged!

Looking back, it seems ungrateful. John was such a supporter and promoter of music – not only of Dolly's and mine, but of Steve Ashley's too, who he worked with for years, producing Steve's 1974 album Stroll On. Steve and I recorded John's song ‘Honour Bright’ (available on Within Sound), from a ballad opera that John was writing, The Anonymous Smudge, who stood as ‘the everyman soldier’. Sadly, Smudge never had a performance in England, but years later in 1981, when John had moved to New York, it was broadcast on the radio station WBAI. In 1978 he wrote The Blackbirds of Brittany with Bert Jansch, a protest in song following the catastrophic oil spill off the coast of Brittany which killed untold thousands of seabirds. His heart was always in the right place.

John was also filming Jimi Hendrix. He had interviewed Jimi shortly after his arrival in England in August 1967; the article was published in The Observer that December. One unforgettable summer's day (in 1968 or ’69) Jimi visited us in Blackheath. We had been to see him in concert; he had such presence and his songs were original and great and his performance beautiful, exciting and charged with danger. I sat gasping at the sounds he produced from his guitar and anxious about his teeth when he used them on the strings! For Jimi to come to our home was a thrill and a pleasure; he was handsome, playful, teasing, sweet and graceful. He sat Polly on his knee; she'd have been about six or seven years old and was enchanted by him, gazing raptly into his face.

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