Johnie Winch: Retracing his Roots

John Winch has been playing ‘roots’ music – folk, blues, country, bluegrass, Cajun and skiffle - for six decades. For the last two (as throughout the 1980s) he’s lived and performed in Germany as a blues guitarist and singer. A correspondent to this site affirms that John remains an ‘extremely talented guitar and banjo player and has a fabulous blues voice.’ 

Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s John was a major feature on the English south coast’s folk music scene. On occasions he, Kelvin Message and other musicians would perform together at the end of a club evening. Kelvin has commented that John's heavily blues-influenced guitar style was so versatile that he was doing the work of three musicians at once. It was reading this site’s profile of Kelvin that led John to get in touch from Germany. ‘It brought back a lot of memories,’ he said. 

John explained that in the first half of the 1960s he was performing in the UK as a solo guitarist and singer as well as playing in a duo with Rod Machling. During this period Johnie (as he was then known) also founded several ‘roots music’ venues in East Sussex. 

John says that he started the ‘Country & Gospel Club’ at ‘The Heart & Hand’ pub in North Street, Brighton. The club was born out of necessity due to overcrowding as punters were coming in increasing numbers, both to hear the performers and in some cases to play informal guest spots too. Among the growing audience were some famous, or soon to be famous, names. Says John: ‘[O]n a Saturday evening, I and a few others would have a song session in the pub… It was often visited by such well-known names as Wizz Jones, Long John Baldry, and many others including, on the very odd occasion, a certain Rod Stewart and his hangers-on. 

'(It) became so crowded that I managed to persuade the landlord to let us use the empty room upstairs. That was an instant success.’ However, recalls John, this ‘also became so crowded that we had people standing on window sills and down the stairs. Once again, we didn't need to book guests as there were many 'names' just dropping in for a floor spot.’ When there was a spot available that is. Wizz Jones played a guest spot, as did several other major league folk performers such as John Renbourn (subsequently part of The Pentangle; he was ‘a good friend of mine’ commented John), and Nic Jones (‘another very good friend and an excellent guitarist and traditional singer’ who tragically ‘had a bad car accident and had to give up the guitar’). Also taking turns at John’s club were the renowned banjo player Pete Stanley, whose diverse plaudits later included work with Bryan Ferry; and John Pearce, the folk performer who had his own BBC guitar tuition programme in the 1960s. 

Eventually says John, the landlord, surprisingly perhaps, ‘got so fed up with the overcrowding and being overwhelmed with business that he gave us notice to quit.’ John recalls being shocked at the time, but now observes: ‘[I]t … gave me the motivation to move to a bigger place and to start organising as a folk club proper.’ John approached the landlord of ‘The Stanford Arms’ at Preston Circus in Brighton. John knew the place as a ‘stop-off on Saturday mornings for a game of cribbage and couple of pints of Guinness after work. I knew there was a large and empty room upstairs. The landlord agreed to let me start the club up there….and, after a couple of weeks of (distributing) flyers’ and of growing interest due to ‘word of mouth’, on a Sunday night John began hosting what would become another highly successful version of his Country & Gospel Club. 

Modestly, John says that ‘[L]uckily…(it was) an immediate success. We tried to work on the basis that everybody who played there ….could expect the same treatment as anybody else. There were no 'superstars' and everybody had the same chance to perform, should they wish. I also featured some of the Brighton street musicians when and if they were willing and needed a few bob. Very soon though, because of overwhelming attendance, we had a need to book 'names' as special guests in order to take the pressure off our regular (‘resident’) floor singers…. This is where Brian Golbey first came in (see picture below of John, on banjo, performing with Brian (fiddle), circa 1963). John says of Brian, he was ‘[O]ne of the (few) Brits to win a Nashville country award for best singer.’ John remembers that ‘We guested a few times at the Sidley Folk Club and also at the Nelson Folk Club’ (at the eponymous Hastings pub) during this period.

Soon after John had begun running the Country & Gospel Club at ‘The Stanford’, he brought in Rod Machling to help with the organisation of what had also become a much in-demand venue. Together they formed a successful musical partnership too. Rod was ‘an excellent guitarist and singer,’ notes John. ‘We were booked (to play) at many of the folk clubs….from Portsmouth to Crawley to Hastings.’ 

After they’d played such a gig they’d often return to one of Brighton's coffee bars, such as The Lorelei in the Lanes, ‘for another session of music into the early hours.

'We had many fans and a programme that offered everything from Rod's serious protest songs and humorous Music Hall numbers, to my Old Timey American banjo mountain songs and Mississippi guitar blues. Also…we included a certain amount of country and bluegrass too … This gave us a vast and hugely interesting programme to choose from.’ 

From performing his own slots at ‘The Stanford Arms’, John acquired the nickname ‘The Reverend Winch’. He explains this seemingly unlikely moniker: ‘At this time I used to sing a lot of Gospel songs, which were not only very popular but, more importantly, (they were) centred on audience participation. The evening often began and ended with people standing on the chairs and everybody was singing their hearts out as though it was a service in a deep south black Baptist church.’ John stresses that his good-humoured nickname was not indicative of any deep religious motivation on his part. 

John says that after the huge success of the Brighton ‘Country & Gospel Club’, ‘[W]e decided to start a second club in Eastbourne. I already knew of ‘The Dolphin’ pub because one of my relatives used to go there and had told me about the large room at the back…. Again, the landlord agreed to its use, and so began the Eastbourne branch of the ‘Country & Gospel Club’. 

‘I will never forget (our) opening night,’ says John. There were, he recalls, 97 female college students ‘and (just) five men including ourselves.’ Both clubs, he says, were held on a Sunday night and so they had to share out the available guest singer and resident spots accordingly. While running ‘The Dolphin’ and Brighton music clubs, says John, ‘[T]hey both became exceptionally well-known on the scene, from London to the south coast, and we had many a top class guest, with whom we often became really good friends.’ 

Asked to list some of the major names that appeared at ‘The Dolphin’ and ‘The Stanford Arms’ branches of his ‘Country & Gospel Club’, John mentions some of the biggest names in folk and blues. Among them were Bert Jansch; leading UK blues and pop performer Long John Baldry (with whom Elton John first cut his musical teeth); The Levee Breakers (featuring singer Beverley Kutner who famously later teamed up with John Martyn); Tom Paley from The New Lost City Ramblers, Dave Evans (an ‘amazing guitarist, says John), John James, Johnny Duncan (an American bluegrass and country singer who, John notes, had a skiffle hit with 'Last Train to San Fernando'), Johnny Silvo, Caroline Hester, Julie Felix, and (as at ‘The Heart & Hand’) Wizz Jones, John Renbourn, John Pearce, and Pete Stanley. 

After two years of ‘total success’, John says ‘[T]he whole thing had become a bit too much. Rod, myself and Brian Golbey (who'd also taken on some organisational duties) decided to take on board another couple of friends who were willing to do some of the donkey work, which included bookings from various agencies, standing on the door on club nights, organising residents, singers, posters and flyers, etc, etc. At this point Rod and I decided to quit the clubs and to leave everything to a so-called folk committee to run them. I had also at this time started taking bookings to perform as a duo with Brian Golbey, which included BBC shows and club gigs along the south coast.’ John recalls that he and Brian recorded extensive sessions for two BBC national radio programmes in the early to mid-1960s; one of which was ‘Sounds of the Night’. 

‘After a while, owing to personal reasons, I stopped playing with Brian and I continued as a solo act, working the southern folk clubs (with bookings obtained) through a London agency.’

In 1978 John released his first record, a three track EP on Joe Stead’s ‘Sweet Folk and Country’ label (formerly known as ‘Sweet Folk All’). John’s own song, ‘Little Woman’ was on Side 1, with his arrangement of ‘Come on in My Kitchen’ and a cover of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Lady Jane’ on Side 2 (see pic below). (As a singer, guitarist and banjo player, Joe Stead was a major name on the UK folk scene.)

Sometime in the late 1970s, says John, ‘[A] friend offered me two tours in Bavaria, Germany. They (were) very successful and in the early 1980s this gave me the idea to move to Germany on a permanent basis.’ In fact in 1981 John put out an album on the German Brutkasten label entitled ‘I Am A Free and Travelling Man’. It featured ‘Little Woman’ and 10 other self-penned songs. (The artwork is featured below © Brutkasten) The track ‘Free & Travelling Man’ spoke of the freedom of the road, a belief expressed on the LP’s back cover on which John writes simply ‘Keep free and travelling.’ (John’s home-recorded performance of the song, from 2001, can be heard here

After many years of gigging in Germany, John says that the 1990s brought a personal shift. ‘I returned to England with my wife, who had started studying at Greenwich Uni.’ For the next decade, says John, they were based in St. Leonard’s, East Sussex, which was part of a thriving local music scene. ‘I started playing regularly with a new partner there,’ he says, and together they performed under the name of the Yazoo Brothers and as a skiffle band called the Yazoo Skiffle Company. ‘We also had a fun, Cajun-style band, that sometimes performed (in local pubs) as The Tower Road Alligators...’

In September 2020 John wrote on the SMART music site of Hastings music impresario Alan Esdaile, ‘I remember well George Street Hall (in Hastings) and doing gigs (on the same bill as) SoulXpress as if it were yesterday. Also, (I recall) my own very long and mad stint of (playing) Sunday mornings at ‘The Standard’ (or)… at ‘The Nelson Folk Club’, in the days of Wilf the landlord, (with) Jeff Coates and Bruce Astly hammering away in ‘The Nelson’ on a Sunday morning session. I used to play banjo then, which was kindly lent to me for the session by Ron Harrison who sometime during the session, and after a few pints….burst into a great version of ‘Shoals of Herring’. Those were the days when there were still a few herring in Hastings waters. SoulXpress were one of the best of the Hastings groups (along with) Tich Turner, Stallion, Chris Sayer and many more. Hopefully Barry, Lenny, and the others are still alive and kicking. Unfortunately some have left us, but I shall never cease to be amazed that there were so many good musicians and so much live music in such a small town.’ John is very pleased to still be playing live. He told me: ‘I am still playing the odd blues gig with a German guitarist partner, and hope, with luck, to carry on for another few more years.’ Or, as he commented on the SMART website, ‘I’m 78 now, an old geezer, but still as mad and still playing...’ Reflecting on all that had happened over his musical career, he says, ‘Actually, there are so many stories that I could probably go on for hours about those days. Many fun days, many good friends.’ John is pictured below (with Peter Gall (left) and Gerald Stegmiller (right)) performing at a festival in the German village where he now lives.

John says he hopes that this article will add a ‘bit of interest’ to the more musically open and inclusive side of the Sussex folk scene that ‘was often a bit dominated by the traditional side of folk music,’ he says. ‘What a lot of people seem to have forgotten …is that a great many old folk songs from the British Isles went to America in the sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen hundreds and, much later, returned to Britain in a slightly (altered) form. It was often stated, with a slight tinge of standoffishness, that we (me, my partners and friends) were singing ‘American songs’ as opposed to the purists who only sang ‘English’ or … ‘Sussex’ songs. There was sometimes a definite border drawn between the two. However, as I so often stated in the folk club days, I don't think it really matters who sings what, as long as they enjoy it, and, if there is one, the audience enjoys it too.’ 

John is still drawing in audiences and is still a fine musician and singer. As in the sentiment he inscribed on his album, he’s also still ‘keeping free’. The travelling that went with that freedom took John a long way from where his musical journey began, but he remains very connected to his diverse musical roots.

Dave Arthur: The storyteller tells his story

Together with his then wife Toni, Dave Arthur was a pivotal figure in the UK folk scene in the 1960s and 70s. As a duo they broke down the barriers that compartmentalised traditional music, and in the process they helped made “folk” a more understandable part of British culture. In the latter 1960s and early 1970s they were unique in combining song, music, dance, story-telling, even magyk, in a single gig.

Dave argues that these days folk is more open to its constituent parts and to other traditions, but when they started out this was unusual. Just as there were folk clubs, blues clubs and jazz clubs, so within the folk scene there were the folk singers, the dancers (whether Morris or ‘social dancing’), and, occasionally, the story tellers. Rarely did the twain meet.

The standard image of a folk musician from this era is that of a young man playing an acoustic guitar in a London coffee shop. In fact the names who predominated were disproportionately Scottish in origin and often not especially folk in musical orientation. Leading "folk" guitarists Bert Jansch, John Renbourne and Davey Graham were more rooted in the blues, and brought a strong “jazzy blues” feel to their so-called folk playing, argues Dave Arthur. They didn’t popularise the use of the guitar on the folk scene either. In fact when a whole host of “folk” guitarists were arriving in London in the mid-60s, folk fashion had already dictated the ditching of guitars for the imagined folk purity of acapella performances. Dave had stopped playing guitar as this point, and he and Toni would often perform traditional songs unaccompanied, and use their instruments to perform a reel or a jig. Toni was clog dancing at some of their earliest gigs; it was some years later before others, such as Maddy Pryor, took it up, he notes.  

Dave’s hero, AL ('Bert') Lloyd, about whom Dave has written an excellent biography, was central to the 1950s UK folk revival. Dave, like Bert, is open, embracing, and inclusive. In 1950s and early '60s England however, the man who ultimately determined what passed for folk correctness was singer Ewan MacColl, the man who’d been decisive in pushing the acapella trend. A communist paradox, MacColl insisted that his version of English folk be the template that the whole scene should follow. Folk for MacColl was also a political manifesto based on the imagined realities of English rural and industrial life. “MacColl thought the sky would fall down if someone played a Stratocaster at a folk gig,” says Dave, noting the parallel with those who were so outraged at Dylan’s electric conversion. MacColl was also a classic example of “don’t do as I do, do as I say,” noted Dave when reminded of a flautist accompanying MacColl on one version of his classic ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’. Peggy Seeger, MacColl's wife and musical partner, would often play along on an Appalachian guitar, he noted.

Those less hidebound by musical nationalism would both treasure lost English folk gems, and take a healthy, internationalist, interest in popular music from around the world. Dave, like his mentor Bert, wanted to mine lost songs and traditions as cultural artefacts in their own right, to reify not deify them. However, as Dave points out, Bert too would discard much 'traditional' English material as not “properly” folk, even though such songs would be sung, acapella, by poor people in village pubs up and down the land. ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’ didn’t pass muster for the cultural high command of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (any more than ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Working Class Hero’, would for folk purists today).

Dave: an early 70s publicity shot

Since the 1990s Dave has been as likely to be singing Appalachian songs as English ones. Like his stories, they have evolved as they’ve been passed down from generation to generation. Likewise, a measure of Bert’s curiosity and openness was his interest in central and eastern European music. Says Dave, Bert discovered in the 1950s that folk music in the communist bloc had often been “modernised” by being played on accordions and clarinets. However Bert knew that it would have been absurd to have suggested to these musicians that they weren’t playing their own music properly. Dave argues that Fairport Convention’s ‘Liege & Leaf’ (voted the most influential folk album of all time in a 2006 BBC Radio 2 poll) was appreciated by Bert for bringing some traditional material to the attention of modern listeners. Electrification wasn’t Bert’s thing either, but Fairport Convention’s ability to instrumentalise around a traditional song impressed him, says Dave.

Dave points out that the Fairports were by no means the first contemporary musicians to dig out songs like ‘Tam Lin’. Though their lyrical take on it was unoriginal, their "folk-rock" reworking of the tune, and of other songs, was exciting, says Dave. Fiddler Dave Swarbrick had introduced the traditional numbers to the band, having learnt them off of Bert, and Sandy Denny wrote good songs of her own, he says. Pentangle - incorporating Jansch, Renbourne, Jacqui McShee and decidedly non-folk musicians Danny Thompson and Terry Cox - picked up on a few well known folk tunes too, says Dave. It was the Scottish-Jamaican guitarist Davey Graham though that everyone really admired, he says. His eclecticism encompassed ragas more than reels, his tuning method was highly influential, and his ‘Anji’ was the standard that every budding “folk” guitarist had to play. (Not for nothing perhaps was his seminal 1965 album called ‘Folk, Blues and Beyond’). The much quoted ‘Folk Roots New Routes’ album that Davey Graham recorded with Shirley Collins in 1964 was mostly a separate showcase of each of their talents, and, he argues, its influence can sometimes be overstated.

At the time Swarbrick was one of a handful of professional fiddle players on the UK folk circuit, observes Dave. He had been part of the Birmingham scene under eponymous group leader Ian Campbell (father of UB40’s Ali and Robin Campbell). Swindon folk club was run by Ted Poole. Liverpool had Jackie and Bridie and the Spinners, Dave recalls. Pete and Marion Grey ran a club in Brockley, south London. Dusty Jeans and Pete Sadler ran and performed at the Rusty Rails folk club in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, he remembers. Didcot in Oxfordshire was the first club gig that Dave and Toni performed at.

By day Dave was running the literature and records section of the Pergamon Press bookshop in Oxford, owned by Buckingham MP Robert Maxwell, later the infamous head of Mirror Group Newspapers. Mindful of the budding university folk scene, Dave kept his section of the shop well stocked with publications like ‘Sing Out’ and the influential Folkways records. He and Toni hitched right across the country to perform at gigs, and would be back in Oxford, sometimes at 5am the next morning, ready to begin work a few hours later. Dave and Toni later moved to Lewisham, south London, where they regularly played host to visiting musicians, from the US as well as from across the UK.

With Toni

The tragic performer Jackson Franke stayed with them for quite a while. His ‘Blues Runs The Game’ was almost as much a folk song standard at this time as ‘Anji’ was for would-be folk guitarists, notes Dave. A great songwriter and guitarist, Franke influenced many players, says Dave, including Wizz Jones and Ralph McTell. He arrived in the UK with loads of money because of an insurance pay-out for injuries he sustained in the States, and promptly bought himself a flash sports car. Jackson had a dark side to him though, says Dave, because of his injuries; and was a child-like prankster, letting off a smoke bomb that closed down half of Lewisham High Street. Jackson couldn’t settle in relationships, observed Dave. He is sadly best known for having died in 1999 whilst living on the streets in the US.

Dave notes that these performers’ supposed authenticity resonated with the dissenting college kids who often considered rock n’ roll commercially crass and vulgar. Folk was the soundtrack for the politically conscious youth who joined the Aldermaston marches in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, he says, just as it was for the anti-Polaris protests in the second half of the '60s. Folk was revolutionary, Dave argues, not just in form but in lyrical content. The overlap with Communism, or at least an acutely class-conscious political agenda, had been spearheaded by MacColl and party member Lloyd, and was burnished by American visitors like Pete Seeger and Tom Paxton. Dave sung me a few lines from Bert’s version of ‘Billy Boy’, which Bert adjusted to address the Malayan Emergency of the late ‘40s to 1960 (one of Britain’s last colonial military engagements). Feelings against the UK tyre company Dunlop, deeply immersed in protecting the source of their cheap rubber, ran high among folk musicians and followers of the time, he notes. However the younger folk protest generation embraced a revolutionary romanticism more enamoured of what, in 1968, was going on in Paris, Prague, Hanoi, and even London and Peking. Of course many of those who later became music legends, whether accepted as such by the folk cognoscenti or not, were primarily focused on the music. Dylan and Paul Simon were, briefly, part of the British folk circuit in the early ‘60s, while 1970s rock stars Al Stewart, Gerry Rafferty and John Martyn had been an established part of the ‘60s folk scene. (Of the three, only Rafferty remained in Scotland, at least until he found pop fame in the ‘70s with pop duo Stealers Wheel). Dave remembers Clive Palmer, of the original, Edinburgh-based, Incredible String Band very well, and he still runs into ISB’s more renowned figures, Mike Heron and Robin Williamson, on a regular basis.

The “progressive” folk musical journey undertaken by ISB underlines how much the burgeoning scene of which Dave was a progenitor had outstripped the confines of “folk”. By the late 60s/early 70s, the UK folk revival “had died a death,” he argues. Yet Dave remained broadly a part of the amorphous folk movement. He played with the late Barry Murphy in the Anglo-American banjo playing duo, The Rufus Crisp Experience, and in addition to still globe-trotting in his storyteller guise, Dave Arthur is part of the roots musical group, Rattle on the Stovepipe.

Rattle on the Stovepipe, with Pete Cooper (left) and Dan Stewart (right)

Dave hated the fact that, like pretty much all UK folk singers in the 1960s, he couldn’t sing in his own voice. Not having a “regional accent,” he, like many, sang ‘Mummerset’, a nonsense word for a nonsense, fake rural, accent ironically affected by those seeking acceptance from folk purists. In the UK folk world of the '60s and '70s, sounding like you came from Northumbria rather than the south-east of England was much more acceptable. For many years though Dave has sung in his natural voice, whether singing English folk or Appalachian songs whose musical origin, as Dave points out, often lay with British and Irish immigrants. 

The UK folk scene today, while not as influential as it was for much of the 1960s, is in better health, Dave argues. There may have been five fiddlers in the 1960s but there are hundreds of them now, he laughs. You can graduate from Newcastle University with a degree in folk music. From strictly “orbits floating around each other,” folk’s component parts are today more aware of each other’s importance, and performers he says are more open to the diffuse elements of the tradition. There aren’t many who can sing, play, dance, storytell and puppeteer though, as Dave still does.

Dave played at the Royal Albert Hall with Shirley Collins at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in May 2017. Shirley had recently returned to public performance for the first time in 30 years and had released an acclaimed new album ‘Lodestar’. On the night, as throughout her recent UK tour, Dave accompanied her on guitar, as did Pete Cooper of Rattle on the Stovepipe and the album’s producer Ian Kearey. Perhaps it was fitting though that the lifetime achievement awards went to arguably the ultimate world musician, Ry Cooder, and to Al Stewart, confirming that folk is a bit less precious and rather more inclusive these days.