Andrew Curry writes: The folk singer Wizz Jones has died, two days after his 86th birthday, after a short period of illness. His career in folk music stretched over more than six decades.
His son Simeon announced the news on Facebook:
His loss has left a huge hole in the lives of our family and has robbed the music world of one of its precious treasures. His health declined rapidly this year and we thank Trinity Hospice for making his last few days as comfortable as possible.
Wizz Jones had made a living from music since the 1960s, and a compilation released to mark his 75th birthday was called A Life on the Road: 1964-2014.
(Wizz Jones at the Cambridge Folk Festival, 1978. Photo: Tony 1212 via Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0,)
The first thing everyone says about Jones is that he knew everybody and played with everybody—without ever quite being famous himself. In the profile we did of him here last year, we tried to list some of them:
Clive Palmer of Incredible String Band, Eric Clapton, Billy Connolly, Martin Carthy, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and other assorted Pentanglers, even Sonic Youth.
In one of the tributes, Jon Wilks mentioned online that Keith Richards—who is a few years younger—said that Wizz Jones taught him how to play the song Cocaine in the authentic South Carolina style, having learnt it from Jack Elliott. At the time Jones was already making a living from music—which Richards could only dream of at the time.
But that was part of his charm—he was always willing to share.
He also helped to nudge people’s careers in the right direction. He suggested to the then Ralph May that he should take the stage name Ralph McTell.
It is perhaps typical of Wizz Jones—he used to tell this story, self-deprecatingly, from the stage—that Bruce Springsteen opened with his song When I Leave Berlin when he played there in 2012 in front of 55,000 people, but forgot to mention the name of the songwriter.
But Jones also played a lot of other people’s music. When I unexpectedly saw him opening for Steve Tilston (whom he had also helped on his way in music) he played songs by Henry Hipkens, Jesse Winchester, and Jackson C. Frank. Tilston later chided him from the stage:
“You could have played some of your own songs, Wizz. They’re just as good.”
‘Wizz’ wasn’t his given name—it was a nickname given to him on by his mother, based on a character in the British comic the Beano. And perhaps he was lucky with his timing.
He was one of that generation who realised that if you could play guitar and were willing to rough it a bit, you could also travel, in Britain, Europe, and beyond. There’s a famous sequence of him being interviewed in 1960 by the television journalist Alan Whicker in Newquay in Cornwall about the council’s ban on beatniks. The news report includes a topical song he’s written for the story, Hard Times in Newquay if You've Got Long Hair.
And in among the tributes, the American music writer Pat Thomas—who met Wizz Jones while visiting Clive Palmer, of the Incredible String Band—mentions inviting him last year to share his beatnik experiences in a night of tributes to the poet Allen Ginsberg:
Knowing he was one of England's first beatniks, I invited him last year to participate in a night of Allen Ginsberg celebrations. He told tales of wandering through France and his love of Bob Dylan. Soon after, I saw him at the Les Cousins [club] tribute.
Pete Paphides has written a wonderful obituary of Jones, which has been reposted on The Afterword, in which he quotes Wizz talking about some of his more famous folk peers:
“People like Davy Graham and Bert Jansch took it way beyond the stars,” he said, “When Bert and I met, I could see we had the same roots, but he had added this extra thing… he was a genius. Davy was way ahead, I used to follow him around, and to this day, the handful of clichéd licks I do are from watching and listening to him.”
Of course, he was being modest, because he was one of the most accomplished guitarists of that generation. As Paphides said, watching him at Union Chapel in London playing Anji:
There wasn’t a guitarist from Wizz’s generation that could play with the physicality he brought to his instrument… At the Union Chapel, he played Davy Graham’s Anji for what might have been the 10,000th time, and in doing so, combined head-spinning virtuosity with punk intensity.
In his Facebook message, Simeon Jones describes his father as ‘humble’. When he was given a richly deserved Lifetime Achievement Award by the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2019, at the age of 80, he seemed genuinely surprised.
All the same, I’m not sure this goes far enough. He never forgot that it was a gift to be able to play music, and that you needed to respect your talent. And more: that it was a privilege to be paid to play music for other people.
One of the stories we told in last year’s piece was about the 2013 Bert Jansch memorial concert at the Royal Festival Hall, with its sprawling line-up. The economics meant that they could afford to pay only minimum union rates, which made for some delicate conversations.
When the promoter quoted the fee to Wizz Jones, his response was,
That seems like a lot of money for coming to the Royal Festival Hall and playing a couple of songs. Do you mind if I give some of it away?”
As Paphides recalls, “he stole the show”.
Wizz played his final gig at Ivy House at the end of February this year. He was already unwell, his voice quite weak, and he had worried about disappointing the audience because of the quality of the performance, but also—a working musician right to the last—about letting them down through not showing up.
His closing words at that gig were also addressed to the thousands of people who had seen him play down the years:
“Thanks to all the people—all over the world in fact—that heard my songs and my guitar playing, and came to my gigs for all those years. Thank you very much.”
Simeon’s Facebook post also included a link to a track shared via Soundcloud that Wizz Jones had played at that final appearance. He has been playing See How The Time Is Flying, written by his lifelong friend Alan Tonbridge, for more than sixty years, but it was perhaps never more wistful:
https://soundcloud.com/simeon-jones-913147245/see-how-the-time-is-flying
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