Anne Briggs is one of the lost legends of the British folk revival of the Sixties. Orphaned as a young child, she came from Toton in Nottinghamshire - then home to a huge railway depot.
A feature in Uncut last year described how she was discovered:
Her aunt and uncle felt she might be the first person in her family to make it to university, but the arrival of the Centre 42 festival in Nottingham in the summer of 1962 was to change everyone’s plans.
A trade union-sponsored travelling event aimed at decentralising art from London, it hinged on the discovery of local talent. Having learned folk songs off the radio, and the records of Isla Cameron and Mary O’Hara, the 17-year-old Briggs auditioned to appear, and was invited to sing on stage the following night, a one-off engagement gradually morphing into a longer tour, and then a decision to quit school and run away with the circus.
She moved to London, hung out with Bert Jansch and the Watersons, wrote songs and inspired Beeswing, one of Richard Thompson's greatest.
That Uncut piece paints her as an unhappy live performer:
On bad nights, Briggs dissolved on stage, forgetting lyrics and abandoning songs as she battled with her profoundly ambivalent attitude to performing. She always sang with her eyes tight shut, making no attempt to reach out to the crowd; her transcendent nights might be the ones when she managed to blank the audience out entirely. “I was always singing to myself,” she says, momentarily cheery. “I hated being in front of an audience. I was nervous. I was just so fucking nervous.
She recorded a folk rock album in 1973, but hated it so much that she blocked its release. (It emerged in 1997 under the title Sing a Song for You, and everyone else loved it.)
And after that she headed for a remote part of Scotland with her partner, and has rarely been heard from since,
So that's Anne Briggs: a reminder that you can find wonderful artists if you look beyond the usual sources.
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