Rock musicians spent half the 1960s nicking ideas off the folkies. You only have to take a brief listen to Jimmy Page’s Black Mountain Side instrumental on Led Zeppelin’s 1969 debut alongside folk guitarist Bert Jansch’s Black Water Side (see what he done there?) on his 1966 album, Jack Orion, to realise that they are even closer than the (not so) subtle title change suggests.
Fast forward to Led Zeppelin III and that’s folk rock you’re listening to on Gallows Pole – a traditional folk song given the rock’n’roll treatment. And who’s this bloke Roy Harper they’re taking their hats off to on the last track? Some renegade folkie they’ve adopted, that’s who.
The folk scene had remained suspicious of rock music. Even young Turks like Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Ralph McTell were wary of ‘selling out’. When Donovan broke cover and shot up the charts with Catch The Wind in 1965, the traditionalists denounced him as a traitor. They were also pretty sniffy when Jansch and Renbourn became part of the Unplugged-style folk supergroup Pentangle a couple of years later.
It needed a rock group to put the rock into folk rather than vice versa. That band was Fairport Convention. They’d built up a name on the underground scene with their covers of (then unknown) Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. But singer Sandy Denny had already paid her dues on the folk circuit and when they recruited folk fiddle player Dave Swarbrick the die was cast.
Their 1969 album, Liege & Lief, laid down the folk rock template for the decade that would follow. Other bands soon took advantage, although there was an incestuous element at play (in the studio, not the bedroom, gutterbrain. Mind you, come to mention it…): Fairport begat Fotheringay, Richard & Linda Thompson and Steeleye Span who begat the Albion Band and so on. But some bands, like Lindisfarne, seemed to have been waiting in the wings for the call.
Led Zep were not the only rock band partial to a bit of folk either. Steve Winwood took a fancy to the trad ballad of John Barleycorn after the demise of Blind Faith, a solo project that became a new Traffic album called John Barleycorn Must Die. And even though they weren’t going back and cobbling the source material, Jethro Tull were clearly influenced by the folk rock sound.
Once the precedent was set, other folk singers began to cross over: John Martyn, Roy Harper, Nick Drake, Michael Chapman, Al Stewart. They brought their own material to the burgeoning singer-songwriter movement, but it was folk rock that paid their ticket.
