Neil Young once picked the best acoustic guitarist of all time: “He’s my favourite anyway”
Coming up in the folk heyday of the 1960s and ‘70s, Neil Young and his peers are amongst some of the greatest musicians in history. Specifically, they’re some of the finest acoustic guitar players to exist, penning standards that generations since have been learning and covering. But Young’s own favourite guitarist is a lesser-known selection.
In the Laurel Canyon days or the years of the Beatnik New York scene, folk was revived in a new and exciting way. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were racing ahead as the new and beautiful voices of political music, and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen were bringing rich storytelling and poetry to the people. Neil Young, fresh out of Buffalo Springfield, was teaming up with Graham Nash, David Crosby and Steven Stills for a new supergroup, tying the worlds of rock and folk closer than ever.
While rock music is often more closely associated with the instrument, or even labelled as ‘guitar music’, the folk scene at the time was just as exciting and pioneering. While Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix were being held up as Gods on their electric guitars, Young and his peers were making big moves, too. Mitchell’s unique open tunings still sound just as interesting today. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young seemed able to turn acoustic instruments into a symphony, and folk was breaking free of any and all limits of tradition.
But his own favourite acoustic guitarist sits outside of the historic and well-known scene he existed in. While his circle buzzed around California, his musical tastes clearly looked across the ocean to England as he said, “Bert Jansch is the best acoustic guitarist; he’s my favourite anyway.”
Jansch was a Scottish-born musician who first came to be known as the guitarist for Pentangle, a folk group that merged traditional sounds with left-field mix-ins of jazz and baroque. All too often, music history falls into the trap of being too focused on America and ignoring the vibrant scenes that were thriving elsewhere. When it comes to the 1960s especially, we tend to look with wonder towards a core cast of musicians who all existed in the same sphere in the same sunny states.
But while it’s true that America was an exciting place to be at the time, there was also something exciting brewing in the UK. Just as Young and his peers were pushing the limits of folk, England’s scene was reviving it, too.
Jansch and his band were a cornerstone of that, racing ahead as leaders of the UK’s new folk scene. Even though his name might be less known than the gargantuan reputations held by Young, Dylan or Mitchell, his influence travelled with real impact.
Young isn’t the only one to celebrate Jansch as a modern master. His style that merged tradition with something fresh proved incredibly influential. The likes of Nick Drake, Donovan and Paul Simon all cited him as a key inspiration. Even outside of folk and into the world of pure rock, Jimmy Page was a fan. “At one point, I was absolutely obsessed with Bert Jansch,” Page said. “When I first heard that LP, I couldn’t believe it. It was so far ahead of what everyone else was doing. No one in America could touch that.”
Really, Jansch was a muse to muses, and Neil Young is simply one of his devoted fans.