Archie Fisher (1939 - 2025)
Archie Fisher was a major figure of influence and authority in Scottish folk music as a leading singer, inspirational guitarist and songwriter and as a much-respected broadcaster.
The second child of a family of seven, Archie Fisher was born on October 23, 1939 and grew up in Havelock Street in Glasgow. His father, John, was a police inspector who sang as a soloist with the City of Glasgow Police Choir and his mother, Morag, was a native Gaelic speaker from Vatersay in the Outer Hebrides.
On special occasions the family would sing round the piano, as John sang show songs and arias and provided the accompanied. Later, in the 1960s, Archie and five of his sisters performed and recorded as the Fisher Family, with Archie in the role of accompanist, playing guitar.
After attending Dowanhill Primary School and Hyndland Secondary, Archie joined the Merchant Navy at the age of sixteen. In a dockside café in Newark, New Jersey, he heard Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line on the jukebox. A shipmate owned a guitar and Archie borrowed it, teaching himself some basic chords. Back in Glasgow, Archie’s mother bought him his first guitar – purple in colour and with a Palm Beach stencil on its side – for his seventeenth birthday.
Although initially sceptical about the likely longevity of the skiffle movement that Donegan inspired and with a guitar that he described as like playing a barbed wire fence, Archie formed a skiffle group with his sister Ray, schoolfriend Bobby Campbell from down the street on fiddle and another Havelock Street resident, Pete MacKinnon on washboard and snare drum.
The group would presently become a trio, named the Wayfarers after Poor Wayfaring Stranger, the song made popular by American folksinger Burl Ives. Despite highlights such as supporting Pete Seeger at St Andrews Hall in Glasgow in November 1961, they had yet to turn professional. Archie took various jobs, including working on a turkey farm and for the Ayrshire Milk Marketing Board and the Hoover Vacuum Cleaner Company. He also worked, briefly, as assistant stage manager at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow and spent a year with Collet's Chinese Bookshop in London, getting to know the music scene there before returning to Scotland in late 1960.
With the encouragement of Norman Buchan, the English teacher and later Labour MP who ran a ballads club at Rutherglen Academy, the Wayfarers added Scottish material to the songs learned from their American heroes, the Weavers, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy. An audition for Scottish Television earned Archie and Ray slots on the current affairs programme Here and Now and more television and radio work followed including the BBC’s popular Hootenanny. Ray had spent time with the Aberdeenshire traveller-singer Jeannie Robertson and was singing Scottish ballads as well as blues and jazz standards. Archie, who later also played sitar, dulcimer and concertina, added banjo to his guitar skills, spurred on by a lesson from Ralph Rinzler of visiting New York bluegrass band the Greenbriar Boys.
In 1961 Archie and Ray made their first recording, a four-song EP for Topic Records, called Far Over the Forth. The following year Ray married Northumbrian piper and fiddler Colin Ross, of the High Level Ranters folk group, and moved to Tyneside. Archie was living in Edinburgh, where the Wayfarers played at the now legendary Howff on the Royal Mile and where he and Ray played early paid gigs in the Waverley Bar. Archie then ran the Crown Folk Club, with Jill Doyle, the sister of guitar virtuoso Davey Graham, and mixed with musicians including Robin Williamson, Clive Palmer and Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band.
A story that grew from this time, when Archie was giving guitar lessons in the Howff, is that Archie taught the influential Bert Jansch to play. Archie has always denied this, saying that he might have shown Jansch a few things he’d gleaned from listening to Big Bill Broonzy records slowed down but Jansch was responsible for developing his own brilliance.
During the 1960s, Fife had a strong folk club scene and Archie moved there, living in Aberdour, St Andrews and Falkland, teaching guitar in various schools. He and Ray featured on two LPs recorded during the Edinburgh Festival in 1964. Then, in 1965, Topic released The Fisher Family, an LP featuring Archie with sisters Ray, Joyce, Cindy, Audrey and Cilla, who later formed a well-regarded duo with guitarist Artie Trezise that was subsequently behind the hugely popular Singing Kettle children’s shows.
In 1968, Archie released his first, eponymously named album for Transatlantic Records’ XTRA label. It featured the sitar he had brought back from a photography assignment in India and became a go-to album for budding singer-guitarists.
By now an adopted Fifer, Archie went on to work with Fife’s emerging singer-songwriters Barbara Dickson and Rab Noakes before forming a long-running partnership with Dundee-born fiddler and mandolinist Allan Barty. Working on Here and Now, where he wrote topical songs to a deadline, had brought editorial rigour to Archie’s songwriting and given him a taste for broadcasting. His second album, Orfeo, released on Decca Records in 1970 and featuring mostly original songs was followed by the more traditional oriented Will Ye Gang, Love for Topic in 1976.
A period working with Irish troubadours Liam Clancy and Tommy Makem, as touring musician and record producer, a skill he also brought to folk band Silly Wizard, was followed by broadcasting work, producing features and contributing songs to schools programmes. He was soon back on the road though, touring the US and Canada with Garnet Rogers, brother of Canadian singer-songwriter Stan Rogers, before - in the late 1980s – becoming director of Edinburgh Folk Festival.
Archie’s tenure as host of BBC Radio Scotland’s Travelling Folk began in 1983, initially sharing the role with singer Robin Hall and going on to lend his insightful commentaries and well- informed interviewing to the programme for twenty-seven years.
He continued to tour, with Rogers, who produced Archie’s acclaimed Sunsets I’ve Galloped Into album, and on one occasion with John Renbourn and Bert Jansch. His songs, including Dark Eyed Molly, which has been recorded by Fairport Convention and Eva Cassidy, among others, continue to find their way into singers’ repertoires.
Archie’s immense contribution to folk music was recognised with his appointment as MBE in 2006 and by an eightieth birthday concert, Archieology, at Celtic Connections in 2020 when old friends including Barbara Dickson and Rab Noakes joined in the celebrations.
Archie Fisher - folk legend's tribute celebrates the legacy of his famous pupil
Archie Fisher was playing a gig in Cardiff a few weeks ago when three young Bert Jansch aficionados turned up to hear the man who taught Jansch to play the guitar.
Speaking to them between songs Fisher made sure they realised that this claim to fame wasn’t quite as accurate as they thought it was.
“I did show Bert how to play some things I was playing,” says Fisher who, if not the man who taught Bert Jansch to play guitar, remains a hugely significant figure in the story of the Scottish folk music scene. “But I was only an influence on him in so far as I had a guitar as well. He’d watch me playing and ask me how I played certain progressions and chords but he did that with other people, too. Somebody once called him a pick-pocket guitarist and I’m not sure that’s fair. He just seemed to absorb things by osmosis.”
As the 1960s dawned the folk scenes in Edinburgh and Glasgow, where Jansch had been born in November 1943 before the family moved to West Pilton in Edinburgh three months later, were coming alive with possibilities. American music – blues, political songs and Appalachian banjo tunes – had filtered through via performers such as Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, the Weavers and the like, and an awareness of the Scottish tradition had grown and regenerated, fostered in no small part by the 1951 Edinburgh Peoples Festival Ceilidh, which introduced ballads and Gaelic songs to an unsuspecting audience.
Fisher was among the first to merge these transatlantic strands, earning a reputation as a very accomplished guitar picker as well as a clear interpreter of narrative songs. The Edinburgh hub for the activity that this folk music revival inspired was the Howff, opposite St Giles’ Cathedral on the Royal Mile, and when the man who opened it, Roy Guest, installed his girlfriend, Jill Doyle, and Fisher as guitar teachers, it became a natural magnet for a teenaged guitar obsessive such as Jansch.
Doyle had the distinction of being the sister of the great acoustic guitar innovator Davey Graham, although she didn’t have her brother’s questing appetite for music or indeed his startling ability. So when Jansch very quickly exhausted her knowledge, Fisher took over.
“I remember this lad coming in with a borrowed guitar,” says Fisher. “I think his own guitar had been stolen. Pretty soon he was living in the Howff, where there were quite a few interesting characters to be found. One of them was Len Partridge, who had the first 12-string guitar we ever saw and who I’m pretty sure taught Bert Come Back Baby Blues.”
Partridge had also contributed to the writing of Hey Joe, when he and an American guitarist called Bill Roberts got together in Bunjies, a coffee bar in Old Fishmarket Close in the 1950s, but he wasn’t really cut out for the professional music scene. Not that Jansch seemed to be either, as Fisher remembers.
“Bert was very quiet,” he says. “We didn’t get to know much about him and it really was the case that the guitar was an extension of his personality. He expressed himself through his playing and the songs and the guitar playing became part of the same thing. He wasn’t one for telling jokes or stories back then and that never really changed but he could be mesmerising. I remember one night at Clive’s Incredible Club [the Glasgow hatching ground for the Incredible String Band] when Bert sat and improvised onstage for forty-five minutes. He’d sing a couple of verses of a song then go into a riff and develop it into another song. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone do that.”
When Jansch moved to London, eventually to form The Pentangle and to become an influence on players including Jimmy Page, who appropriated Jansch’s arrangement of Blackwaterside, and Neil Young, who covered Jansch’s Needle of Death but without capturing the original’s singular guitar accompaniment, Fisher would bump into him now and again. He was always struck by the evolution in Jansch’s character each time.
“A few years ago Bert, John Renbourn and I had a curry together and I remembered the first time Bert ever ate a curry in the first curry house near Glasgow University,” says Fisher. “He wasn’t impressed and asked why they had to spoil a good stew by adding all these spices. Of course, he went on to become the great curry connoisseur.”
The music Fisher will play at the first instalment of Celtic Connections’ Jansch tribute, Bert Inspired, will reflect the pair’s two-way exchange and will include songs such as Reynardine, which Jansch learned from Fisher, and something Fisher calls Agnes’s Sister.
The latter is a continuation of various evolutions of Davey Graham’s Anji, the acoustic guitar picker’s rite of passage that Fisher has heard played on the bagpipes as Angus, as an Italian mandolin tune called Angela, and on an out of tune guitar as Agnes.
“Davey wrote that piece but Bert really took it somewhere else,” says Fisher, “and that, in many ways, sums up his musicianship and talent.”
From The Herald, January 29, 2016
