Another Voice from the Past - and the Saddest Story...

My indefatigable son-in-law has done it again, coming up with a fine singer-songwriter from the Sixties folk scene who had somehow eluded me - though, in view of his life story, that really isn't too surprising. Jackson C. Frank, who came over from Buffalo equipped with a Martin guitar, some fine songs and a rich, expressive voice, was a striking figure on the London folk scene of the mid-Sixties, where he caught the attention of John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, Al Stewart, Sandy Denny (his girlfriend for a while) and fellow expat Paul Simon, who produced his first - and, as it turned out, last - album.
 So far, so straightforward, but Frank's back story was tragic, and worse was to come. When he was 11, a furnace exploded at his school, killing 15 of his fellow pupils, including his then girlfriend, and leaving him with burns over 50 per cent of his body. It was while he was recovering in hospital that he was given his first guitar... Ten years later, Frank received a hefty insurance cheque that enabled him to make the journey to London and launch his short-lived musical career.
 It wasn't long before his mental health was beginning to deteriorate, with depression coming to the fore as he developed writer's block and his money ran out (the album hadn't sold, and had barely been noticed except by a few cognoscenti - including Nick Drake, who learnt a lot from it). He went back to the States, and when he made a brief return to London in 1968 he was clearly in a bad way - 'falling apart in front of our eyes,' according to Al Stewart - and couldn't find any work.
 Back in Woodstock, where he'd set up home, he married and had a son and a daughter, but the son died of cystic fibrosis, the marriage fell apart, and Frank was committed to a mental institution. In 1984 he made his way to New York, hoping to track down Paul Simon, but ended up living on the streets, when not being shunted from one institution to another. Some years later, by chance, a fan who lived in the Woodstock area tracked Frank down and, although the singer was by then an unrecognisable overweight wreck, he got him singing again and dug out a lot of his old unreleased recordings - but not before Frank had been blinded in his left eye by a stray airgun pellet while sitting on a street bench. He died in 1999 at the age of 56, and at least some of his songs have lived on, in cover versions and on film sound tracks, as well as on that one album, which was rereleased on vinyl in 2014. There was even a Radio 4 programme about him a few years ago. I managed to miss that too.
 But to the music. Frank's best-known song (covered by Simon and Garfunkel, Bert Jansch, Laura Marling and many others) is Blues Run the Game - here's a link - and it is also my three-year-old grandson Sam's current favourite song. He is a boy of sophisticated and eclectic tastes... This song, dedicated to Frank's girlfriend who died in the fire, was featured on the soundtrack of the film Martha Macy May Marlene. And here's another one... Listening to all of these (and there are more on YouTube), I can't help but think of the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis - and sure enough Blues Run the Game is covered by Colin Meloy of the Decembrists on the concert album (Another Time, Another Place) of that great film.

First Martin

One of the joys of my recent trip to the Mani was the profusion of swallows, martins and swifts. Back in chilly Blighty - where I've already seen my first swallows (in Staffordshire) - I wasn't expecting to see anything more in that line before the arrival of the first swifts, which should be happening around the end of next week if they're on time (and no one could blame them for not being; it's been a cold and uninviting spring). However, as I was walking home from the shops just now, I looked up into the sky to check how close the latest rainclouds were - and there was a lone House Martin, racing overhead like a bird on a mission (presumably to get to its nesting place and start the year). It was a heart-lifting sight on a chilly morning. And the swifts can't be far behind...

Charles Cotton

The poet, writer and angler Charles Cotton was born on this day in 1630, in the delightful village of Alstonefield, just over the Derbyshire border in Staffordshire (I've lunched there many times, at The George, with my Derbyshire cousin). Like many Royalist gentlemen in the wake of the Civil War, Cotton sought a quiet life in the country - and he found it in fishing the River Dove with his close friend and writing partner Izaak Walton. Cotton contributed the section on 'how to angle for trout or grayling in a clear stream' to The Compleat Angler, of which later editions also included Cotton's poem The Retirement.
 Otherwise, Cotton was best known in his time for his more or less indecent 'burlesques' of Latin classics, and for his authorship of The Compleat Gamester, a manual of games that was the standard work until Hoyle came along. He also produced a successful (if unreliable) translation of Montaigne's essays, and clearly had a more sensitive side to his nature, responding warmly to the scenery of the Peak District (whose praises he sang in The Wonders of the Peake) and finding, in the valley of the Dove, his paradise on Earth.
 One of Cotton's poems, The Evening Quatrains - with its startling images of an ant as a 'monstrous elephant' and the shafts of an upturned cart as 'the cuckold's crest' - was set to music by Britten as the Pastoral movement of his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. You can enjoy it, arranged for tenor, horn and piano, in this video. I wonder if Cotton's poem, rich in evening imagery (including 'lowing herds'), fed into the creation of Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard...

Postcards from the Past

I'm indebted to my son-in-law for bringing the singer-songwriter and ace guitarist Michael Chapman to my attention. Somehow, despite the fact that he made several highly-praised albums, was a fixture of the late Sixties folk scene and moved on into prog rock, I never saw or heard him (well, I might have done - those were hazy times - but I have no memory of it). Unlike so many from that era, he's still going strong (at 75) and still exploring new musical territory. There's lots of impressive footage of him on YouTube, but it was Postcards of Scarborough, a track from way back, that caught my attention. It's a good, slightly poppy song, and I love those postcards - I remember Scarborough when it looked like that; in fact I remember those postcards. Many a happy boyhood holiday was spent there, with my brother and grandmother, who left us boys to our own amusements, playing the arcades, going to the cricket, wandering around town in our sports jackets and flannels, climbing up to the church and castle. How long ago it seems... Well, it was.

Who Likes Shakespeare?

In Shakespeare's quatercentenary year (and I must say I don't think much of the commemorative stamps) it's sad to learn that 34 percent of his countrymen and women say they dislike his work, and only 59 percent say they like it. This being a survey result, it must of course be taken with a pinch or two of salt, but what was most depressing was the finding that, in terms of liking, understanding and appreciating Shakespeare, this country came 11th out of 15 countries surveyed, way behind, for example, India, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and even China.
 America came ahead of the UK in liking Shakespeare, but only by a few percentage points - which I found rather surprising, especially after listening to an interesting Radio 4 programme this morning, Shakespeare in Obama's America. Robert McCrum reported from Washington DC on how Shakespeare's plays are used in political discourse, and talked to the likes of Alec Baldwin (does he have a like?) and Stephen Sondheim about the place of Shakespeare in American culture.
 There seemed to be a consensus that if Shakespeare were alive today he would be writing scripts in Hollywood. This chimes with the frequently-heard assertion that, in his home country, he would be writing scripts for EastEnders. Would he? My view of Shakespeare is that he was the most prodigiously gifted poet ever born - but he had the misfortune to be born at a time when it was impossible to make a living as a poet, and only the theatre offered the chance to make money from verse. So perforce he became a dramatist - and, because he was so supremely gifted, became the greatest playwright ever born.

More from the Mani

Around this little church - Agios Nikolaus in the village of Chora - are scattered the ashes of the writer Bruce Chatwin. He and his friend Patrick Leigh Fermor were especially fond of this church hidden among the olive groves, and used to picnic in its shade, overlooking a glorious view of the Messenian Gulf and the surrounding hills. When Chatwin died in 1989, he left instructions for his ashes to be scattered there, at a site that he believed to be sacred as well as beautiful. A little band led by PLF and Chatwin's wife duly performed the al fresco ceremony, with copious libations along the way.
 Chatwin wrote The Songlines while staying at a hotel near PLF's house at Kalamitsi, the Fermors having balked at the prospect of accommodating him under their roof; one mighty, self-mythologising ego in the place was quite enough.
 The Fermor house at Kalamitsi is still there, and still much as it was when PLF died in 2011 (at the age of 96). It is owned by a Greek museum foundation, with the Patrick Leigh Fermor Society also keenly involved in securing its future. Very soon now, the entire contents of the house will be put into storage while the building is prepared for reopening as a museum - but happily our host had arranged for our little group to be shown around by PLF's housekeeper, Elpida (as seen on TV), while it is still as it was.
 When the Fermors had the house built, it stood quite alone, amid olive groves, and it it still well hidden, even though several buildings have gone up nearby. It is a beautifully designed villa set in an equally beautifully designed terraced garden leading down to the sea and the beach from which PLF swam every day until his knees finally gave out, a few years before his death. The house is cool and airy throughout, the garden full of shady corners, and the whole effect is altogether delightful, not to say idyllic.
 Inside all is indeed as if PLF had just stepped out for a stroll (or one of his epic swims); there has been none of the tidying-up and reordering that can so easily drain the soul out of a literary shrine. There are books and papers, photographs and miscellaneous bric-à-brac everywhere - especially books, of which every room has at least a bookcase-full. They are, for the most part, battered and worn and much read, often almost to destruction - the library of a true reader with an extraordinarily wide range of tastes and interests, all the way from the Greek and Latin classics to Tintin and P.G. Wodehouse and such surprising titles as Fuzz Against Junk (Olympia Press) and The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. In PLF's own bedroom - a decidedly ascetic room - there is only a set of Shakespeare, whom he read in his last years more than any other writer.
 Everything about the house looks as pleasingly worn and ragged as the books. The furniture is battered and miscellaneous, the decor far from smart - except for one room. This is the vast and beautiful sitting room cum library where PLF used to hold court, dazzling and charming his visitors well into his 90s. Coming across a library after having already seen so many hundreds (thousands?) of books is a bit of a shock, but the walls are indeed book-lined, and even roughly classified, though the hand-written labels don't often match what's on the shelves. Even in this relatively smart room there are miscellaneous bits and pieces everywhere - pens and pencils, shells, stones, letter-knives, curling photographs, a Patum Peperium pot... And there are PLF's vinyl LPs - a box-full and a cupboard-full - complementing his collection of tape cassettes, which live in a Bendinck's Buttermints box in another room.
 How much of this characterful disorder will survive when the house eventually opens as a museum remains to be seen. It certainly felt very special to be among the last to see the place as it is now, as the Great Man knew and inhabited it.

From the Mani

Well, the Mani did not disappoint, and the walking terrain was not as dauntingly rugged as I'd feared it might be (we were based in the Exo Mani, not the deep Mani). The worst of it was a punishingly long stretch of kalderimi (paved mule tracks built by the Turks) that had somehow been deconstructed into an endless four-foot-wide rubble-strewn boulder field, offering ample opportunities for missed footing, turned ankles and messy falls - with the obligatory sheer drop to one side. Happily we came through unscathed, if exhausted - and there were ample compensations along the way, throughout four days of unbroken sunshine and 30-degree temperatures...
 Not least the butterflies, which were flying in abundance wherever we went: blues, whites and browns of all kinds, many beyond my powers of identification (the 60-odd British species provide enough challenges for me; Greece has four times as many). Swallowtails were everywhere, gliding from flowerhead to flowerhead and even around the village streets. Brimstones were flying, along with Clouded Yellows and Cleopatras, and I saw my first Red Admirals of the year.

But what gave me most pleasure was finding myself among Pearl-Bordered Fritillaries, beautiful small fritillaries that I haven't seen in England in years.
 As for the wild flowers - the great spring flowering was, our host told us, already past its best, so warm and dry had been the early spring, but there were still wonderful things to be seen, including several species of orchids I had never seen before, glorious scarlet-and-black anemones, intense blue pimpernels, the lovely Venus' Looking Glass, and drifts of wild cyclamens. The air was full of smells of sage and oregano and blossom, and the only sounds were of sheep bells and bees, many of them wild black bees in quest of mud for their nests. Twice we came across wild tortoises lumbering across our path...
 And then there were the churches - an astonishing abundance of tiny Byzantine churches and chapels (one village we visited had a total of 60). Many are in completely out-of-the-way locations, some built into caves or cliff faces, others standing quite alone with nothing but olive groves and pastures for miles around. A pleasing number of churches were open, and most of them in a greater or lesser state of decay, though still in occasional use. Several had colonies of bats hanging from the roof, and one was loud with wild bees coming and going to their sanctified nest.
 All the churches were of the same pattern (cruciform, with an apse and, quite often, a westward extension) and all were, or had been, covered all over - walls, dome, arches, window surrounds - with paintings of Christ and his mother, the apostles, favourite Greek saints, and scenes from the Bible. Most of these paintings are badly decayed, peeling and fading away, the remnants of their golden brightness, once-rich colours and stylised faces glimmering faintly through the gloom of invariably dark interiors. Often a face or detail has survived in good condition (or been restored) and you can feel something of the chastening numinous force it must once have had.

 So, butterflies, flowers, sunshine, churches galore - what more could one ask? Well, there was more, and I'll be writing about that tomorrow.