Artist: Anne Briggs
Genre(s):
Folk
Discography:
The Time Has Come
Year: 2001
Tracks: 13
In the annals of pop and tribe medicine, there are few sagas unknown than that of Anne Briggs. An awesomely talented isaac M. Singer of traditional English sept music music, possessing of as pure and breathtakingly beautiful a voice as matchless could hope to deliver, she was the single nigh important influence on a grouping of female British folksingers that includes Sandy Denny, Maddy Prior, June Tabor, and Linda Thompson. Even Norma Waterson, herself a enormously important number in the British tribe music revival meeting of the mid-'60s, admits to being influenced by Briggs' piffle, and notes that Anne Briggs singlehandedly changed the means that English women folksingers american ginseng. What makes this tarradiddle so odd is that Briggs' entire recorded turnout consists of about 30 songs. She stopped up tattle at the old age of 27, supposedly because she despised the sound of her recorded voice. As folk music music became electrified and more and more popular, and bands such as Fairport Convention and Pentangle were reinventing the British folk music custom, and more and more women (Arenaceous Denny, et al.) were babble in a style started by Briggs, her caption flourished, thus far she refused to spill the beans.
Briggs was born in Nottinghamshire in 1944 and began tattle tribe music spell still in her teens. Within a mates of days she was a unconstipated at local tribe clubs, getting her bad break as a resultant of the Centre 42 circuit of 1962. The Centre 42 circuit was an attack by musicians and other artists (backed and supported by trade unions) to deliver politically collectivist cultural activities to areas outside of London. Part of Centre 42's invoke was that in each city, local talent would hearing for a slot as a support act. It was hither that Briggs got her crack and was observed by British phratry caption Ewan MacColl. She was so good that MacColl positive her to leave school and conjoin the lie of the tour. While touring with Centre 42, Briggs began working with MacColl's friend and co-architect of the British phratry music revival, Bert Lloyd. Briggs considers him the to the highest degree significant influence on her exercise, and her debut EP, The Hazards of Love, had Lloyd's fingerprints all over it. But he was non a simple Svengali trying to take advantage of a teen folksinger; he treasured to give her the direction (as well as the songs) she needed to become a brobdingnagian talent. Lloyd was smart enough to understand that this was an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime type of isaac Bashevis Singer, and he treated her with kid gloves, acquiring her to loose (Briggs was notorious for her jumpiness) and serving her phonograph recording some marvelous music. But Briggs had a job with recording her singing -- she detested doing it and hated the way she sounded, so much so that she retired from music, iII years shy of 30, already touted as the sterling legend in English phratry music. Briggs still lives semi-reclusively in England and is still not recording or vocalizing in public, merely her influence remains potent. As guitar player Martin Carthy so capably arrange it: "She didn't mess about. There were no histrionics. There was no posing. There was no self-aware style. She sang fluidly, well, with howling passion."
