How Bert Jansch Changed Folk—And Rock, Too

The Scottish acoustic-guitar legend Bert Jansch—pronounced jansh—died today, at the age of sixty-seven, after a long battle with lung cancer. He released his first solo record, “Bert Jansch,” in 1965. His final recording was “The Black Swan,” released in 2006 by Drag City Records. After moving to London in 1965, he formed the successful group Pentangle with the guitarist John Renbourn in 1967. (They sometimes identified themselves as “folk-jazz.”) The band recorded six albums. In 1973, Jansch left the band, which continued to perform in various permutations. The original lineup reunited in 2008 for a limited tour, and Jansch’s final live performance was with Pentangle at London’s Royal Festival Hall on August 1, 2011. (Click here for the set list and sound samples. For a fabulous two-disc compilation of Jansch’s solo work, try “Dazzling Stranger,” available here if you have Spotify.)

As long as the genres under discussion are neither traditional American blues nor country (where a different subset of heroes obtain), Bert Jansch is one the most important figures in finger-picking and the acoustic guitar itself, alongside people like Davey Graham and John Fahey. Both a singer and player, Jansch was an understated virtuoso, someone who wore his vast technical skill lightly, and sang traditional folk in a way that never made the songs feel like goofy period reenactments (an unfortunate outcome his reverent peers often couldn’t escape). Traditional songs came across like originals when he performed them, and Jansch’s own songs appeared to come from no specific country or time. That was no coincidence—Jansch borrowed open tunings, techniques, and songs from American, British, Scottish, and Irish sources. In turn, he and Pentangle, along with friends like the British singer and guitarist Annie Briggs, established the sound of British folk and changed the way most people approached the acoustic guitar in rock, too. His most famous disciple, indirectly, was Jimmy Page.

At some point in the mid-sixties, Jansch learned the Irish ballad “Blackwaterside” from Briggs. Jansch released a recording of his arrangement on the 1966 album “Jack Orion.” The singer and guitarist Al Stewart followed Jansch’s live shows and learned the arrangement, which he taught to Jimmy Page in the studio while the two were recording Stewart’s second album, “Love Chronicles.” On the first Led Zeppelin record, Page recorded an instrumental version of the song, renaming it “Black Mountain Side,” giving Jansch no credit and adding a songwriting credit for himself, rather than crediting it as “Trad.,” as many artists did with such songs. (This forum discussion teases out the tricky legal implications of playing and recording material that comes from no specific author. There is a case to be made, sort of, that Page was doing nothing different from what Jansch did with his sources.)

Jansch’s reach was wide—in the late sixties and early seventies, the songwriter Nick Drake took Jansch’s noble and sonorous style of picking and made into something light, almost respiratory. The Smiths’ Johnny Marr has repeatedly cited Jansch as a touchstone. In the recent past, Beth Orton praised him, eventually singing on “The Black Swan.” In 2010, Bert Jansch opened for Neil Young on a number of dates. This was, in some ways, payment for debt long overdue. Young cited Jansch on the back of a Buffalo Springfield album over forty years ago, and in a 1992 interview conducted for a French magazine called Guitare & Claviers, Young explained his own moment of Jansch-lifting:

Q : Of all the guitarists you know, who has made the biggest impression on you?

NEIL: Bert Jansch (Pentangle guitarist) is the best acoustic guitarist; he’s my favourite anyway. For electric guitar, I’d say Jimi Hendrix.

Q : Have you met Jimi?

NEIL: A long time ago. Nothing really memorable, but I ran into him a number of times. Stills knew him better than I did.

Q: In your opinion, why is he still considered the best?

NEIL: He was excellent. He was one with his instrument. At that time, no one had pushed the electric guitar so far, and that goes for today, too. He was over everybody. Totally gone. So fluid, using the feedback to create such beautiful things. For a guitar fan like me, it was a revelation. But as for acoustic guitar, Bert Jansch is on the same level as Jimi. That first record of his is epic. It came from England. I was especially taken by “The Needle of Death,” which is such a beautiful and angry song. That guy was so good. And years later, on “On the Beach,” I wrote the melody of “Ambulance Blues” by styling the guitar part completely on “Needle of Death.” I wasn’t even aware of it, and someone else drew my attention to it. I’d met him in England in the early 70s, with Pentangle, but I had this huge limousine and all that shit and they had a strange attitude with me, considering me as one of those bonehead superstars.

Matt Sweeney, singer for Chavez, collaborator with Bonnie Prince Billy, and guitarist on records by Johnny Cash and Adele (on “21”), admired Jansch and eventually met him. He wrote to me in an e-mail:

Bert Jansch’s music went straight under my skin the first time I heard it, driving through a Pennsylvania rainstorm in the early nineties. His guitar sound is at once hypnotic and electrifying, his voice and words are full of raw empathy that cuts hard and deep. Songs like “Needle of Death” “Tell Me What Is True Love” “Running From Home” changed me, and changed the way I hear songs.

My friends Brad Truax and Jesse Fischler were road managers for Bert’s tours opening for Neil Young, and I met him a few times. Bert was very gentle and a man of very few words. I remember telling him how “Lucky Thirteen” was the first thing I heard from him, thinking he’d appreciate that I was into an old obscure record of his. He said, “Well, yeah, that’s just a compilation that the label put together. It’s not really a proper album.”

On the phone today, the singer and guitarist Stephen Malkmus talked about Jansch’s place in history and how he affected Malkmus’ own work:

His life was fascinating—in the early sixties, he played the coffee house circuit in London and was considered something like a quasi-Bob Dylan, and then we was playing with Pentangle and creating these guitar deconstructions of tunings and Davey Graham’s style. I like how he sang—it helped people like me who can’t sing that well. He was an idiosyncratic signer with his own delivery. He was a beautiful guitar player and greatly influential to people like me. There’s something kind of puritanical and technical in his playing. He wasn’t super-flashy but he got the job done. What he was doing wasn’t easy at all but somehow it was done with a certain restraint, a little bit classy, I guess, compared to people like Leo Kottke. It seemed that to me that he had a real understanding of folk songs and how heavy they are. He was a young hipster at one time, playing these songs, but he did in his own awesome way. Just ask Jimmy Page—I’m sure he’d say the same thing.

UPDATE, 9 P.M.: Neil Young sent along this statement:

With deep regret, Pegi and I acknowledge the passing of Bert Jansch. Pegi and I were lucky to play with him on all of our shows for the last couple of years. He is a hero of mine, and one of my greatest influences. Bert was one of the all time great acoustic guitarists and singer-songwriters. Our sincerest sympathies to his soulmate, Loren. We love you, Bert.

Photograph by David Redfern/Redferns.