“We don’t hear Sandy Denny on the radio these days. Her records, few that they are, don’t fit the current formats, don’t send the programmers into paroxysms, don’t have listeners voting in. She couldn’t be considered for Sixties, Seventies hit nostalgia; she never had hits. Rock album stations? Never sold enough albums. Even Nick Drake sneaks into the odd Easy Listening show, the music lulling and deceiving, with its attractive surfaces hiding the pain within, something romantic for a cult to cling to. But where is Sandy’s cult? Where are the graveside vigilants à la Jim Morrison? The colour supplemental cultural dissections? The South Bank Show eulogies, the bad TV- and film-biopics telling us who should be important in our lives? Somewhere the taste gurus have failed the flock, have failed to tell us, after twenty years of hindsight opportunity, that Sandy Denny was the greatest British female artist of her generation.”
Richard Thompson
It’s true I’ve got all of Nick Drake even the fourth CD which was just recently released but not a single Sandy Denny CD.
http://www.nickdrake.com/albums.html
Might try the Best of first
http://www.codehot.co.uk/sandy/records/bestof.htm
all I’ve heard of her so far is the Fairport Convention stuff of Richard Thompson’s Watching the Dark
http://www.rykodisc.com/Catalog/dump/rykoalbums_443.asp#Reviews
Great voice
PS
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pis&GRid=20256&PIgrid=20256&PIcrid=658430&PIpi=139932&
Most people know her voice from The Battle of Evermore on Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. Her albums are a bit patchy. Sandy (1972) is probably the best overall (includes the amazing a cappella Quiet Joys of Brotherhood) but I’d recommend the two-disc collection, No More Sad Refrains, which has all her best solo work and early songs from the Fairports and Fotheringay.
No doubt about it: Sandy Denny was world’s best female (folk)singer. Magical, magistral, heartbreaking…..