The song Martin Carthy taught Bob Dylan: “We just swapped songs all the time”
The Mercury Prize has always been the bastion of authenticity in music; well, it’s hoped to be.
Since its inception, it has sought to push back against the rising tide of music commercialism and bureaucracy by rewarding more alternative musicians with an honour that recognises the album as the most important musical medium.
The album should stand alone, separate from the fine-tuned marketing rollout of a label and as such, allow the music and nothing else to do the talking. This should, in essence, widen the goalposts for Mercury Prize nominations to include acts outside the realms of widespread popularity. This year, in most cases, it hasn’t succeded, but in one, very heartening and obvious circumstance, it has.
Folk icon Martin Carthy became the oldest ever Mercury Prize nominee this year at 84, for his record Transform Me Then Into a Fish. Not nominated for the carefully curated photoshoot that accompanied the album, nor the high-flying tour that followed its release, Carthy made the grade for delivering something unique and accomplished.
In being nominated, he’s charged a lightning rod through the cultural landscape. Where the Mercury Prize shortlist usually acts a directory for every finger on the pulse hipster, Carthy’s inclusion on the list had everybody clutching for their phones to immediately Google some context. Who is Carthy? What genre does he play? Is this his first album?
Of course, all of the curiosity was desperately misplaced. This is an artist who has long cemented his legacy before the record-breaking Mercury nomination and certainly didn’t need the approval of culture vultures to cement it. But upon the unravelling storylines that made up the chapters of his career, it became increasingly apparent that this was an artist of huge importance.
His nomination for a folk record naturally puts his name in the same descriptive circles as Bob Dylan. But on the surface, that doesn’t tell us a great deal. Such is the reductive nature of the discourse around folk music as a whole, it’s hard for people to not funnel their narrative back to the great pioneer of the genre.
However, Carthy was more than just a recipient of Dylan’s cultural impact. He was the writer of a song that Dylan himself asked to be taught, a song that now exists on his Mercury Prize-nominated album.
‘Scarborough Fair’ has lived inside the walls of Carthy’s guitar for 60 years, back in the days when he frequented the London folk scene and played intimate shows in front of the likes of Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. Upon hearing that song, he recalled that Dylan exclaimed, “Teach me that! Teach me that!”, a request to which he obliged, and the latter turned the bones of the song into his very own hit ‘Girl From The North Country’.
It’s important to note that Dylan’s own rendition of the song came about from his inability to replicate Carthy’s number, as the latter recalled, “He wanted to do it with a flat pick, though he’s a perfectly good finger-style player,” adding, “He got the giggles all the time and it made him laugh”.
When Dylan later transformed his song and continued to achieve massive success, it was surely a bugbear for the otherwise struggling musician, right? Not at all, Carthy remembered, “We just swapped songs all the time. That’s what people did”.
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