Listening to a lot of Bert Jansch at the moment, bought two LPs in Selectadisc this morning and am wondering what took me so long to get hold of any of his stuff...
nice clip here of him playing 'Black Waterside', which was ripped off completely by Jimmy Page on the first Zeppelin album, as 'Black Mountainside'.
I think Bert attempted, briefly, to get Zep to cough up some royalties for the liberty of stealing his arrangement, but since the song is traditional, he came out with nothing (that didn't stop Jimmy Page crediting it to himself on Led Zep 1).
In fact Jansch was taught the song by Anne Briggs, who had in turn learned it from someone else, so it all gets a bit confused. It's definitely Bert Jansch's arrangement which features on the Zep album though...and it's not the only example of them pinching tunes and claiming to have written them - they settled out of court with Willie Dixon over 'Whole Lotta Love'.
2 comments:
Watched the Folk Britannia rerun on BBC 2 the other night; lots of vintage Martin Carthy and Watersons stuff. But they played a live recording of Anne Briggs singing Black Waterside and Lowlands Away. What a voice.
some terrific stuff on that episode in particular. Some of the Watersons footage was shot at the Blue Bell in Hull, where I used to play pool and drink very cheap Sam Smith's bitter.
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