Nic Jones

Track	Album
Annan Water	Ballads And Songs
Annachie Gordon	The Noah’s Ark Trap
Canadee-I-O	Penguin Eggs
The Humpback Whale	Penguin Eggs
The Little Pot Stove	Penguin Eggs
Farewell To The Gold	Penguin Eggs
Clyde Water	Game Set Match
Ploughman Lads	Game Set Match
The Jukebox As She Turned	Unearthed
Master Kilby	Unearthed
Bonus Track
Teddy Bears’ Picnic	In Search Of Nic Jones

The idea of the ‘triumph over adversity’ has become a cliché of modern music documentaries. Indeed, it is often used in cases where the ‘adversity’ involved was either comparatively minor or relatively trivial. In relation to Nic Jones’ life and musical career since he suffered severe (not to say life threatening) injuries in a car crash in 1982, however, this sometimes-hackneyed phrase has real meaning. His injuries left him in a coma for several weeks. Afterwards he remained in hospital for eight months for reconstructive surgeries on most parts of his body. His programme of physical rehabilitation continued for many years after the accident. For those interested in the extraordinary story of his rehabilitation from those injuries, the documentary The Enigma of Nic Jones is very highly recommended (see video in Links below).

At the time of his accident, Jones had established himself as one of the finest guitarists and singers in English folk music. He had developed a highly distinctive and idiosyncratic way of playing guitar which rendered him one of the most immediately recognisable artists in the genre. His playing had a unique percussive/ rhythmic quality, which owed a good deal to his interest in reggae and rock music. Allied to this was his unique singing style, which often seemed to go slightly against the grain of his guitar accompaniment. This set up a tension which helped him to keep the listener’s attention, even in those long narrative ballads in which he excelled. One of the tragedies of his accident was that it left Jones unable to play the guitar in public again. He does still practice guitar on his own but his problems with coordination mean that he is unable to perform. In more recent times, however, his son Joe has proved a skilled accompanist for his singing (see video in Links below).

Nic Jones was born in Orpington in Kent in 1947. When he was very young, his family moved to Brentwood in Essex which is where he grew up. He first developed an interest in music as a teenager with some of his key influences being guitarists like Hank Marvin, Duane Eddy, Wes Montgomery and Chet Atkins. Although his early influences tended in a rock ‘n’ roll direction, he eventually drifted towards folk music through the influence of his schoolfriend, Nigel Paterson. He was a member of the folk group, the Halliard, and he eventually invited Jones to join them as a guitarist. During his time with the band, he also took up the fiddle and gained invaluable experience in arranging folk songs (their version of The Croppy Boy – with Nic singing – can be heard here.) The track also reveals the strong Martin Carthy influence on Nic’s style at that point in his career.

After the Halliard split up in 1968, Jones embarked on a solo career. My first pick here, Annan Water, comes from his debut solo album, Ballads And Songs, first released in 1970. Like his second solo album, Nic Jones, this is extremely difficult to find on CD – they both had a very limited CD release (see details of Ballads And Songs and Nic Jones at Discogs).

While Ballads was clearly a transitional album, where Nic was still in the process of forging his own individual style, Annan Water has a stately beauty that is distinctively its own. The song was also an early example of his tendency to combine lyrics he discovered (in this case from a Child ballad) with melodies from other traditional songs. In this case, he also supplied part of the melody himself.

For my second selection, Annachie Gordon, Jones followed a similar pattern of splicing together lyrics from a number of different ballads, while adapting the traditional melody to his own style. His version of it first appeared on his third solo album, The Noah’s Ark Trap. Due to legal issues (broadly similar to the case involving the great Scottish folk singer, Dick Gaughan, which illuminates some of the circumstances surrounding this), both it and Nic’s fourth album, From The Devil To A Stranger, have never been released on CD.

By the time he recorded ‘Annachie’, Jones had become bolder in his approach towards arranging folk songs. He developed a new freedom and looseness in his guitar playing, which in turn permitted him to take liberties with the vocal line in a way he had not previously done. A live performance of the song from the John Peel show can be heard here. The Irish singer, Mary Black’s classic version of the song has a close resemblance to Nic’s slower rendition.

The two selected tracks from these hard-to-find albums can be found on the more widely available compilation, Never The Same: Leave-Taking From The British Folk Revival 1970-1977.

Nic Jones’ fifth solo record, Penguin Eggs, ranks high among the very best folk albums ever recorded in the British Isles. It is the record on which all of his superb talents – as a guitarist, singer and supremely accomplished arranger of folk songs – reached their peak. It is also a remarkably coherent collection of songs, which made it very difficult to select individual tracks for inclusion. In the end, my choice was based on selecting those which gave a good representation of the qualities of the album as a whole.  The first choice, Canadee-I-O, is Jones’ best-known rendition of a folk song. This is largely due to Bob Dylan’s subsequent recording of the song, which leans quite heavily on Nic’s version.  Although the history of the song is somewhat obscure, it probably first appeared as a broadside ballad in the early nineteenth century. It stands out for its combination of his superb guitar playing – with its mixture of delicacy and rhythmic precision – with one of his very finest vocal performances.

His willingness to trawl far and wide to find songs is well displayed by the next three picks. Of these, The Humpback Whale (aka The Ballina Whalers) and The Little Pot Stove are Australian songs, while Farewell To The Gold comes all the way from New Zealand. The Scottish-born Australian songwriter, Harry Robertson, wrote the first two of these songs, while Paul Metsers wrote the third (he can be seen singing it here).  In all three cases, Jones’ versions stake a strong claim to be the definitive ones. In particular, his version of ‘Farewell’ brings out beautifully the song’s mixture of poignancy and frustrated yearning for a better life. Both ‘Little Pot’ and ‘Farewell’ also benefit from fine backing vocals by Dave Burland and Bridget Danby.

My final selections come from the three albums of demos, outtakes and live performances released by Jones’ family in the years since his accident. My first pick from them is Nic’s magical eastern flavoured version of Clyde Water. For me at least, this belongs in the same rank as such other masterly arrangements of folk songs as Bert Jansch’s Blackwaterside or Reynardine. As a piece of guitar playing, I would also put it close to being on a par with Davey Graham’s Anji.

My second pick, Ploughman Lads, is a beautiful ballad and Nic does full justice to it. By contrast, I chose the country-esque The Jukebox As She Turned to show off the eclecticism of his musical tastes. As Nic himself has put it, “any song that tells a story, is well crafted, and has a good tune” appeals to him.

While Nic recorded Master Kilby on his 1978 album From The Devil To A Stranger, I have chosen the live version from Unearthed for inclusion. Its slightly rawer quality fits the themes of the songs better than the studio version.

Nic Jones’ unexpected return to live performance from 2010 onwards – along with his son Joe and Belinda O’Hooley – has been both inspirational in itself (considering the injuries he suffered in the car crash) and has served to refocus attention on his brilliant solo work. This has further cemented his legacy as one of the greatest artists in English folk music, one whose contribution to the genre is immeasurable.

Bonus Track

Had to conclude with this brilliantly witty and wonderfully dextrous piece of guitar playing:

NB: I have drawn on Nic’s very useful sleeve notes from the Unearthed compilation (2001) in writing this piece.

Nic Jones Official Website

Nic Jones wikipedia

“The Enigma of Nic Jones” (full documentary on Vimeo)

Nic & Joe Jones live in (full) concert (YouTube)
Filmed by Murray Grainger in 2015 at the Ryburn Folk Club

Nic Jones – His Guitar Style (The Living Tradition)

Michael Raven’s interview with Nic Jones (1997)

Penguin Eggs: Celebrating 40 Years (Folkworld 2020)

Record Collector article (2019)

The Halliard page at Mainly Norfolk

Andrew Shields is a freelance historian, who grew up in the West of Ireland and currently lives in Sydney, Australia. Along with an interest in history, politics and literature, his other principal occupations are listening to and reading about the music of Bob Dylan and, in more recent years, immersing himself in the often brilliant and unduly neglected music of Phil Ochs.

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