Fairport Convention

This is the first of two posts on “Crazy Man Michael.” Read the second post here. 

Within the fire and out upon the sea

Early in the morning hours of May 12, 1969, four of the five members of the British band Fairport Convention were traveling by van when Harvey Branham, the band’s manager and sound technician, fell asleep at the wheel. Tragically, the resulting crash killed the band’s drummer, 19 year old Martin Lamble, and Jeannie Franklyn. Franklyn was an American fashion designer and girlfriend of the band’s guitarist, Richard Thompson. She had created clothing for a number of pop and rock stars of the day. Musicians from L.A. to London sought out her designs. Although I can find no published birth date for her, she was older than Thompson, who was 20 at the time. She was also Phil Ochs‘s cousin.

Thompson, Ashley Hutchings, Simon Nicol, and Branham suffered varying degrees of injury in the crash, which devastated the band. Simon Nicol recounts that Fairport’s female lead singer at the time, Sandy Denny, nearly had to be admitted to the hospital when she came to visit her injured bandmates, so great was her distress. Denny was the only band member not in the van at the time of the crash.

In the wake of this tragedy, the band’s producer, Joe Boyd, arranged for Fairport’s members to retreat to a house in Fairley Chamberlayne, near Winchester, England to recuperate. This summer respite entailed rest, musical research, rehearsal, soccer, kite flying, busking to cover the milk bill, and the creation of what the BBC has called the most influential British Folk Album of all time, Liege and Lief.

Over the course of the summer, band members made periodic visits to the Cecil Sharp House to mine the archives there for material. Liege and Lief presents rock and roll settings to the traditional music they found, bringing it alive in a distinctive way. (I think our first turn with the album came with Pat’s discussion of “Matty Groves” last year.)

Violin player Dave Swarbrick joined the band at Fairley Chamberlayne, bringing a wealth of traditional folk music knowledge. New drummer, Dave Mattacks provide percussion to these mostly traditional songs, and his innovative approach, the bass work of Ashley Hutchings, and the guitar wizardry of Richard Thompson infused a new kind of vibrancy and energy to the ancient material, although I’m sure the members of the band would be the first to tell you that the power of the songs was there all along.

Two of the eight songs on the original album are not traditional, but you might be hard pressed to single them out by their sound or lyrics. The latter of the two, the song’s concluding track, “Crazy Man Michael,” is the focus of our posts this week. Penned by Thompson and Swarbrick, it represents an early flash of genius in Thompson’s songwriting career. I provide this history of Fairport Convention and the creation of Liege and Lief not for its own sake, but because it is one path for discovering important thematic terrain within this week’s song.

Crazy Man Michael went walking

Here is the song as it appeared on Liege and Lief.

Listen on Spotify here.

Here are the lyrics as provided by Richard Thompson’s web site.

Nigel Schofield, in his extensive liner notes to the Free Reed box set RT: The life and music of Richard Thompson, accounts for the song’s origins as follows:

“There were essentially two approaches [to Fairport Convention’s version of Folk Rock], both evident on Liege and Lief: one was to take existing ballads and treat them as rock songs…; the other was to update traditional songs so that the reference was modern but the style remained the same. It was this last approach that Richard was taking with “The Bonnie House of Airlie,” from which an early version of “Crazy Man Michael” emerged. Dave Swarbrick suggested setting the lyric to a tune he had already written, which then involved Richard in some rewriting of the words.” 

Ironically, the success of Liege and Lief spurred both Denny and Hutchings to leave the band, for opposite reasons. Denny left the band thinking that the turn to traditional material would be permanent, and thus stifle her songwriting aspirations. She was correct, at least about the first part. (Thompson left the band a few years later for essentially the same reason.) Hutchings left because he wanted to engage more deeply with traditional material. He started Steeleye Span. As a result, the performance career of “Crazy Man Michael” with Fairport was quite limited. Denny’s lead vocals were a signature element of the song. Despite Thompson’s suggestions of successors, the band never pursued another female lead singer.

Schofield comments that “Crazy Man Michael” is “the most recorded of Richard’s songs and the one you are most likely to hear performed in a folk club.” Whether that was true in 2006, I’ll wager that at least the first part is no longer true. Thompson’s iconic “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” which we discussed here last year, probably outstrips it. “Michael” is probably the most recorded song of Thompson’s Fairport material and perhaps the most easily mistaken for a traditional tune.

And asks of the wild wolves their pardon

The symbolically-rich raven and its magical transformation augment the ancient air given to the song by its tune and structure. When we turn someday to a more systematic treatment of these songs, the role of birds as symbols and actors will be a rich chapter. We have seen birds as witnesses and symbols, from Tom’s post last week on “The Twa Corbies” to Pat’s post on “Lady Isabel and the Elf Night,” all the way back to Shaleane’s posts on “Young Hunting.”

However fully Thompson and Fairport intended “Crazy Man Michael” to blend back into the mists of folk tradition among the songs in Liege and Lief, the term “crazy” initially struck me as being a rather modern way to describe madness and mental infirmity. Another blog’s interpretation of the song puts the term “crazy man” as one that designates Michael as a shaman or a sorcerer–in some respects casting “Crazy Man Michael” as a variety of the kind of “swords and sorcery” music Jon Langford alluded to a few weeks ago. This more magical, less psychological alternative reading casts Michael as bewitched and betrayed. We’ll get back to the “crazy” business shortly.

“Thy Raven Wings,” by armawolf at deviantart.com

Schofield writes that “Michael” is “quite clearly (and this is one reason Richard still finds it a demanding song to sing)…an allegory for the guilt and loss he felt over the death of his girlfriend, Jeannie Franklyn.” Thompson gently contests or at least nuances this reading in his interview with Schofield, also included in the liner notes to the Free Reed box set.

“It is a very emotional song. In fact, it’s a song I only really started singing myself [in about 2004]. Firstly because it’s a difficult song melodically to sing, and I wanted to find a way to modify the melody slightly. Plus it’s about Fairport’s car crash in ’69; there’s nothing in it directly about what happened. You could look at it circumspectly and say, ‘This is about losing my girlfriend,’ but at the time I was in hospital and I just began by writing a story, just enjoying the process of putting down a story. It emerged that it was about stuff close to home. It is nice, given all that, to be able to get close to the traditional model.” 

However much I generally eschew looking for the “real story” behind the song, it’s difficult to ignore the context of this song’s creation. Furthermore, it’s been an argument all along in our blog that murder ballads–be they mystical or mundane–often function as vehicles for processing loss and guilt. Thompson is particularly generous with interviews these days, providing even further insight into these connections and his artistic process.

I erred, however, in thinking the term “crazy” was too modern for the implied ancient setting of the song. In fact, it suits it far better than the alternatives I had considered. Some sources place “craze’s” entry into English in the 14th century, and others in the 16th. Etymologically, “craze” comes from Middle English and Scandinavian words that mean “to crack,” “to crackle,” or “to break.” Whether you opt for a reading that makes Michael a betrayed magic-man or a deluded madman, the word works better than I realized, particularly in light of Thompson writing the song while recuperating from the crash.

Nevertheless, Thompson’s songwriting process is distinct from our process of experiencing the song as listeners or singers of it. The song keeps its power in part because, like many good songs, it’s resilient in the face of attempts to pin it down fully. Thompson’s song allows the listener to choose between magical and realistic interpretations of the events. One may take the raven’s metamorphosis at face value, within the context of the song, or view it from a realist’s perspective as a product of Michael’s madness. More options are certainly possible. In other words, Thompson’s artistry rises to a level that renders any purely autobiographical reading insufficient.

The song is also powerful as a nearly perfect and quite economically rendered tragedy, in the Aristotelian sense. The hero’s action is his own undoing and he realizes it, if he does at all, only too late. The exact dimensions of the tragedy will change based on a number of factors, including whether you can fully believe Michael’s perception of events or what the narrator tells you about them. Do we believe that Michael recognizes what he’s done only after he does it? Can we trust the narrator’s word that Michael’s eye is sane and speech is plain, particularly in light of what we hear before and after that line? While the tragedy might resonate most forcefully through the surprise of a first listening, the song continues to reward the returning listener in pulling on some very deep cords as we come back to it again and again.

Michael he whistles the simplest of tunes

As I mentioned above, neither Fairport Convention nor Richard Thompson performed this song very often in the years following its initial release on Liege and Lief. Unfortunately, I cannot at the moment find a streamable version of Thompson’s solo recording of the song from the RT box set. The performance is excellent, although (or because) the arrangement is spare–just Thompson on acoustic guitar, and to all appearances it is a studio recording, which lends a very intimate air to the performance. Ask not for whom the bell tolls…

Fairport Convention, in its later incarnations, has revived the song, sometimes with a male lead, other times with guest female vocalists to take up Denny’s part.

Here is their performance from their 35th anniversary DVD. Simon Nicol takes the lead vocals.

In the clip below, Chris While fills in for the late Sandy Denny, in a 2007 Cropredy performance featuring the rest of the original Liege and Lief members of Fairport.

In a follow-up post, we’ll listen to other performers who have taken a turn with “Crazy Man Michael,” and see how the song has navigated the boundaries between traditional folk and more contemporary arrangements.

Coda: Songs for a Tailor

Songs for a Tailor was Jack Bruce‘s debut solo release, and something of a landmark in the development of blues-jazz fusion and a step toward progressive rock. Bruce, the bassist for the band Cream, which also featured Eric Clapton, named the album after Jeannie Franklyn, also known as Genie the Tailor. Frankyn had designed many of Cream’s stage outfits and was also an ex-lover of Bruce’s. Bruce was not the lyricist for the album’s songs, Peter Brown wrote them, so there appears to be little thematic connection to Franklyn’s death other than the tribute in the title. You might think twice in listening to “The Weird of Hermiston,” but Brown wrote it prior to 1969 and Cream recorded it as a demo 1967.

Weird of Hermiston
I’m going to a wedding dressed in black
I’m going to a party, won’t be back
And I’m not going with you . . . no . . .
Trees are no longer a comfort
Messages sad in the wires
My hair is hung down with the blackest of rain that I’m feeling

I’m going to the river, wash my tears
I’m going to the mountains, cool my fears
That I’m not going with you . . . no . . .
Skies are no longer a comfort
Leaves turning black with the autumn
The corn is hung down with the heaviest weight that I’m feeling

I’m going to a funeral dressed in white
I’m going to a nightclub, to sleep with night
And I’m not going with you . . . no . . .
Love is no longer a comfort,
Fantastic times are forgotten
My heart is hung down with the saddest of rain that I’m feeling