From there we stay in traditional territory for the duration, with The Gardener, Nottamun Town (the traditional tune Dylan appropriated for Masters of War that subsequently turned up on Fairport Convention’s What We Did On Our Holidays) and Henry Martin.
The album’s other highlight is Black Water Side, thought to have originated in Northern Ireland, also covered by, among others Anne Briggs, Sandy Denny and any number of Irish performers from the Clancy Brothers down.
This story of a woman who has her heart broken when a suitor breaks his promise of marriage, although she hopes he will change his mind one day came into Jansch’s repertoire by way of folklorists Peter Kennedy and Sean O'Boyle, A.L. Lloyd, and Anne Briggs. Briggs and Jansch often performed together in folk clubs and around the beginning of 1965 were spending most of the daytime at a friend's flat, working on new material and adapting traditional material to fit Jansch’s guitar work.
Jansch had been playing Black Water Side live well before the Jack Orion sessions and Al Stewart, who’d been following Jansch's gigs closely, had figured out what he thought was Jansch's take on the track, though he used the wrong tuning. Stewart was in the middle of recording his first album, with Jimmy Page playing the sessions and during a tea break Stewart taught Page his version, which subsequently appeared on Led Zeppelin as Black Mountain Side.
After that, the traditional Pretty Polly rounds out an album that might have been light on for original material (though Jansch’s original material drew heavily on traditional sources anyway) but set the groundwork in place for Pentangle’s exploration of the same themes and set things up (at least that’s the way it looks with the benefit of hindsight) for the traditional goes electric approach taken by Fairport Convention, Ashley Hutchings’ various projects along the same lines and much of what followed through to the present.
Hugely influential and required listening for anyone interested in the field.