Day Eleven - Somewhere Tonight

“The river still she flows
       Never asking who you are”

You can hear an audio version of this post here.

Today’s song is Somewhere Tonight by Johnny Dickinson. The track is quite hard to find so I have temporarily uploaded it for you here. Maybe you have heard of Johnny, maybe you haven’t but he was best known for his excellent guitar playing. I saw him twice at Montrose Folk Club and although his name was totally unknown to me the first time I saw him in March 2006 I’ve not forgotten it since. Johnny was a totally brilliant musician (and I’m afraid it is past tense, Johnny died in 2019 after a long period of illness). A Northumberland native (and the second Northumbrian to feature in this series of posts*), Johnny had something really special – a beautiful touch on the slide guitar and a voice so gentle and calming that I often still listen to his music when I can’t sleep. It was blues, but blues like a big warm bath. With really nothing but his playing (the chat was fairly minimum by folk club standards, as far as I remember) he put audiences under a spell. Songs blended into each other, genres melted. He just played and played and played and it was all amazing.

Like most folk club regulars, we became big Johnny Dickinson fans (read more about him here). When we came across him he was a solo artist but previously he had been in a rock band called Splitcrow, a bluegrass-influenced band called Moonshine Boys, he had also started Paul Lamb & the Kingsnakes (with fellow Northumbrians Paul Lamb and John Whitehill) and then a psychedelic roots band called Hillbillies From Outer Space. Oblivious to all this, we saw him again solo at Montrose Folk Club in November 2007 and also got tickets to see him in a late-night gig alongside Kristina Olsen at Stonehaven Folk Festival in 2007. Kristina was brilliant but sadly Johnny didn’t make that gig (something to do with being stuck in an airport). We were disappointed but we just bought more of his albums and listened to them (a lot). Having lived in the north-east of England until I was 16 (if a little further south in counties Durham and Cleveland), I found (and still do find) something comforting in his soft but very North East England singing voice. That is only part of his appeal though – his sound is very wide and interesting. His early passing is very sad but I also think it’s a tragedy his music isn’t more widely known these days. On Spotify there are just a few tracks of his from a compilation album (though there’s a bit more on YouTube, mainly live stuff), but the albums are mainly only available now if you can track down the CDs (I have them all, I think). Ebay’s your best bet.

The folk club in Montrose had blues acts on fairly regularly and I suppose Johnny fitted partly into that genre but, like most great musicians, he was really just a musician (with notes of blues and folk and all sorts in there). I think the album I first knew was either Hilo Town or it might have been Sketches from the Road (both 2006, the latter a live album). The production on these albums is just gorgeous, as is the playing. On Hilo Town the sleeve notes from Johnny says: “Here we have a collection of traditional music from England, Scotland, Ireland and America. As usual, I have arranged the material in my own fashion, drawing inspiration from many sources including, Sol Hoopi, Elmore James, Gypsy Jazz, Celtic Pipers and Mariachi Bands, Peggy Lee, Nic Jones and Martin Carthy**.” We used to listen to this album in the car– all singing along to Single Girl, A Beggin I Will Go and so on. Sketches from the Road is a live album recorded in Leeds, Leicester, Colchester and Norwich and it contains a mix of traditional songs and other compositions. It features, amongst other things, one of Johnny’s own songs (Ocean Blues), plus versions of Jackson C Frank’s Blues Run the Game, K.C. Douglas’s Mercury Blues and Fred McDowell’s I Wish I Was in Heaven. All round it is a pretty heavenly collection.

A little later on, I think, I got a copy of Johnny’s 2005 album English Summer, which features all his own compositions (and look at the players on the album, see pic above, quality all round!). It is a lovely album – never off my phone and I even use one of its tracks,I hear you calling, for my ringtone (well, it makes me smile, even if no one else gets it). It was to this album that I went looking for something for this project and to be honest I could have any picked any or all of its 12 songs (though I did also consider some of the covers from other albums, I wish I was in Heaven, in particular). However, English Summer is the album I’ve probably listened to most since Johnny died and I wanted to highlight his songwriting as well as his musicianship (because the latter was celebrated more in his lifetime perhaps). The lyrics cover a lot of blues ground but there is a lightness in there too. I picked Somewhere Tonight because it’s at the more cheerful end of the album. Night canoeing with a soft-voiced bluesman? Dancing in the dark? Oh, go on then…

*The first was Judy Dinning, back here. As I said back on that post, Johnny Dickinson played on Judy’s Fine Times album.

**Incidentally I saw Martin Carthy (perhaps one of the better known names in English folk) at little old Montrose Folk Club in August 2006. Acts that might be considered big folk names who I saw there over the years were: Dick Gaughan (brilliant), The McAlmans, Adam McNaughtan (he was amazing – well-known in Scotland for amongst many other things The Jeely Piece Song), Jackie Leven (writer Ian Rankin’s always going on about him, so I hear, but his show didn’t do a whole lot for me to be honest), Archie Fisher, Steve Tilston, Tom McConville, Bob Fox, Jez Lowe and Andy Irvine. I will be writing about two of my favourites from this fine (gentlemen’s) club this month: Martin Simpson (on Day 15) and Dundee’s marvellous Michael Marra (tomorrow!).

This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022's Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.

If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).