Biography
Barry Dransfield has shaped the course of British folk music from the late 1960s onward, thanks in part to his distinctive practice of cradling the fiddle against his chest instead of beneath his chin so he can sing simultaneously. Several notable recordings made with his sibling Robin include Rout of the Blues, which Melody Maker selected as the finest folk album of 1970. Appearances alongside the Albion Band placed him on the influential 1972 anthology Morris On. Solo endeavors proved equally fruitful: Dransfield supplied music for the motion picture S.O.S. Titanic as well as British television productions such as Play Away, Samson and Delilah, and Ballymena Opera House, and he embodied the blind fiddler Michael Byrne in the Mel Gibson, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Anthony Hopkins vehicle The Saga of H.M.S. Bounty. His debut solo LP, long regarded as a prized collector’s piece, earned Record Hunter’s designation as the rarest folk album.
Friends from Leeds’s Irish district instructed him on fiddle, after which Dransfield took the stage in Yorkshire public houses prior to turning fifteen. For three years he and several companions operated the semi-professional bluegrass and old-time string band the Crimple Mountain Boys, modeled on the New Lost City Ramblers. In 1969 he quit his harp-building position and persuaded Robin to abandon teaching so the pair could perform together full-time. Regular appearances at the Harrogate Folk Club, where they shared bills with Martin Carthy, Ewan MacColl, and the Watersons, helped cultivate an audience, and by 1971 the duo had grown into a four-piece acoustic and electric ensemble. Two years of continuous activity culminated in the simultaneous arrival of the duo-and-band sets Rout of the Blues and Lord of All I Behold together with Barry Dransfield’s initial solo outing. The brothers accompanied British singer-songwriter Ralph McTell on the road and received an invitation to tour with Steeleye Span before securing a Warner Bros. contract.
That promising run ended abruptly once Steeleye Span learned of the Dransfields’ vigorous live shows and rescinded the offer; the siblings instead supported American singer-songwriter Tom Paxton across the United Kingdom. Mounting tensions on that tour produced irreconcilable disputes between Robin and Barry, dissolving the group. Although Barry Dransfield ascribed the ambitious yet commercially unsuccessful album The Fiddler’s Dream—issued on Transatlantic and drawn from stories of an imaginary itinerant fiddler—to the former band, the project remained essentially a solo venture. After nearly a decade apart, the brothers reconvened in 1977 to cut the acoustic-duo record Popular to Contrary Belief before each again pursued separate paths.
Following the 1984 solo release Bowin’ & Scrapin’, Barry Dransfield declared his withdrawal from concert stages and established a violin and cello restoration workshop in Hastings, England. He reentered performance life with renewed intensity in the mid-1990s. The 1994 solo album Be Your Own Man announced his return, after which he ranked among England’s most active musicians; a British tour supporting Steeleye Span inaugurated a two-year stretch of near-constant club and festival engagements throughout the United Kingdom. His fourth solo collection, Wings of the Sphinx, appeared in 1996. In 1997 the Free Reed label issued Up to Now, a 39-track retrospective covering the combined and individual discographies of Robin and Barry Dransfield.
Friends from Leeds’s Irish district instructed him on fiddle, after which Dransfield took the stage in Yorkshire public houses prior to turning fifteen. For three years he and several companions operated the semi-professional bluegrass and old-time string band the Crimple Mountain Boys, modeled on the New Lost City Ramblers. In 1969 he quit his harp-building position and persuaded Robin to abandon teaching so the pair could perform together full-time. Regular appearances at the Harrogate Folk Club, where they shared bills with Martin Carthy, Ewan MacColl, and the Watersons, helped cultivate an audience, and by 1971 the duo had grown into a four-piece acoustic and electric ensemble. Two years of continuous activity culminated in the simultaneous arrival of the duo-and-band sets Rout of the Blues and Lord of All I Behold together with Barry Dransfield’s initial solo outing. The brothers accompanied British singer-songwriter Ralph McTell on the road and received an invitation to tour with Steeleye Span before securing a Warner Bros. contract.
That promising run ended abruptly once Steeleye Span learned of the Dransfields’ vigorous live shows and rescinded the offer; the siblings instead supported American singer-songwriter Tom Paxton across the United Kingdom. Mounting tensions on that tour produced irreconcilable disputes between Robin and Barry, dissolving the group. Although Barry Dransfield ascribed the ambitious yet commercially unsuccessful album The Fiddler’s Dream—issued on Transatlantic and drawn from stories of an imaginary itinerant fiddler—to the former band, the project remained essentially a solo venture. After nearly a decade apart, the brothers reconvened in 1977 to cut the acoustic-duo record Popular to Contrary Belief before each again pursued separate paths.
Following the 1984 solo release Bowin’ & Scrapin’, Barry Dransfield declared his withdrawal from concert stages and established a violin and cello restoration workshop in Hastings, England. He reentered performance life with renewed intensity in the mid-1990s. The 1994 solo album Be Your Own Man announced his return, after which he ranked among England’s most active musicians; a British tour supporting Steeleye Span inaugurated a two-year stretch of near-constant club and festival engagements throughout the United Kingdom. His fourth solo collection, Wings of the Sphinx, appeared in 1996. In 1997 the Free Reed label issued Up to Now, a 39-track retrospective covering the combined and individual discographies of Robin and Barry Dransfield.
Albums
