JACK ORION

OK, so I own the 1970 American version on Vanguard (same label that brought you Joan Baez and Country Joe & the Fish), so this was released some four years later, with a totally different cover (a 1970 picture of Bert Jansch on the cover) and the songs switched around. This is without a doubt my favorite folk album ever. This is straight-up folk, not even folk rock, but even here you can hear elements of what would become the Pentangle, which comes as no surprise, given he and John Renbourn had released albums under their names and together prior to the Pentangle. Here you get "Black Water Side", much talked about, especially because that was the basis for Jimmy Page on Zeppelin's "Black Mountainside", but then it was actually a traditional folk song, but make no mistake the guitar picking from Jansch, and hearing that again on Zeppelin's first album. There's Ewan MacColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", which he did with wife Peggy Seeger, and later on in 1969 by Roberta Flack (which became a big hit for her in 1972). Jansch's version is all instrumental, though. "Pretty Polly" is a nice folk song, plus you get another version of "Nottamun Town", which many of you should be familiar with through Fairport Convention's second album What We Did On Our Holidays (or simply Fairport Convention in the States on A&M, with a different cover, not to be confuse with the self-entitled debut that was released in Polydor in the UK, but Cotillion in the US). The title track is amazing, a great folk epic. If you know the version of the Pentangle's Cruel Sister, then you'll notice this one is at a much faster tempo, and half as long. If you didn't care for the slower pace of the Pentangle version, you'll like this one much better. Might not be quite prog folk here, it was 1966, after all, but a real enjoyable folk album!