Story of the song: Blackwater Side by Anne Briggs

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb on ‘Blackwater Side’ by Anne Briggs

Anne Briggs, the Nottingham folk singer with a voice as fine as lace, made the song her own in 1963 (Alamy)

Black Mountain Side”, the instrumental interlude on Led Zeppelin’s first album, passed through many hands on its way to one of rock’s most powerful debuts. Zeppelin’s guitarist, Jimmy Page, claims he first heard “Blackwater Side”, a traditional Irish number, from Anne Briggs in a London club. Briggs, the Nottingham folk singer with a voice as fine as lace, had made the song her own in 1963. It was brought to her attention by the folk collector, Bert Lloyd, who exhumed a field recording of it from the BBC Archives. The raw, unaccompanied version Briggs heard was by 21-year-old Mary Doran, part of a group of Travellers found singing around a campfire on the outskirts of Belfast in l952, and captured for posterity by English folk song collector Peter Kennedy.

The ballad of how a young man spied a “lovely maid” in a shady grove was first published in the 1880s, by the broadside printer Henry Such. Here, the man seduces the girl and proves himself a dishonourable lover. “It’s one of those pieces whose verses have floated in from half a dozen other songs,” commented Lloyd. By the time it reached Briggs, it had become a familiar tale of broken promises. She arranged it for the guitar, borrowing her accompaniment from another folk comrade, Stan Ellison.

If Briggs was the catalyst in the popularisation of “Blackwater Side”, then her musical partner in the early Sixties, Bert Jansch, was its champion: “I remember learning [it] from Anne, basically by playing on the guitar exactly what she’d sung and then fitting riffs to it,” said Jansch. His baroque arrangement became a cornerstone of the seminal 1966 album Jack Orion, and inspired Page’s arrangement. When Jansch heard “Black Mountain Side”, credited to Page and augmented with a tabla drum to give it an Eastern flavour, a half-cocked legal case ensued, eventually abandoned when Jansch could not of course prove the song was his.

In truth, “Blackwater Side” belongs to no one, although it has been covered by many, from Sandy Denny and Linda Thompson to Celtic folk rockers Altan. All have Briggs to thank. “I don’t personally identify with the sentiments,” she said. “But it’s a lovely thing to sing and, in the midst of the Swinging Sixties, was a sad reminder of a harsher and unequal sexual morality that still lingers on.”