From Elgin to America: The colourful life of ‘singing scholar’ Royston Wood
As the Second World War was raging, a five-year-old boy sat beside his father in front of the radio receiver in their family home in Elgin – and experienced a musical epiphany.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ recent composition ‘Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus’ (1939) was on air, an orchestral composition based on a traditional English folk song, and little Royston was awestruck by the tune and the quiet grandeur of the string arrangement.
The five-year-old boy’s musical inclinations were not surprising: his father Charles had been the headmaster of a Surrey village band, and his mother Constance had been a touring opera singer with the Carl Rosa Opera Company when she was young.
At home, she played selections from Gilbert & Sullivan operas on the family piano – and wee Royston would join in, singing along with her.
Royston had been born into a sheltered Surrey suburbia on February 20, 1935, until the war disrupted his childhood.
The Woods relocated to the Elgin area, not too far from Fraserburgh, where Charles, a policeman, was assigned to do “top secret” work for the BBC.
Royston, his sister Diana and younger brother Graham grew up amidst hard times – and symphonic music became a consolation.
Eventually, the circumstances of the war prevented Royston from receiving musical education. Thus, on leaving high school in the mid-1950s, he embarked on a regular, non-musical career that was semi-creative at best: he was employed as an advertising clerk for health food and pharmaceutical companies in London.
He married, became the father of a daughter and a son – and fell into turmoil when one day his employer “gave him the sack”, as he himself put it.
The disruption caused his first marriage to fail, but brought him closer to music, which the self-professed “creative listener” had always loved, but never pursued actively.
Strolling through the burgeoning London folk club scene in the early 1960s, and earning his living as a lorry driver, Wood happened to find out that he could improvise bass harmonies, and co-founded the influential unaccompanied folk trio The Young Tradition in April 1965.
The flamboyantly dressed group, which took such disparate influences as The Copper Family from Sussex, the American Sacred Harp singing tradition and the intensity of Greek-Orthodox chants, became stars in the scene.
They also popularised the English sea chantey in America, when they appeared at the renowned Newport Folk Festival in 1967.
Befriending celebrated musicians like Bert Jansch, Martin Carthy, Alexis Korner, Donovan, Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen, Royston found himself amidst a vibrant London music scene – and never failed to bring an elegant, symphonic note to the projects he was involved in.
When in 1969 Fairport Convention first injected traditional English folk music with electric rock’n’roll, Wood was cautiously interested.
Although he never associated himself with rock music, he seemed quite enthralled by the uncharted opportunities that electric instrumentation had to offer, and co-founded the Albion Country Band with Fairport Convention founder Ashley Hutchings in late 1971.
The group played spectacular music – as unofficial recordings show – but fell apart due to artistic differences.
Wood envisioned himself as the frontman of an electric madrigal band, with the electric guitar and the electric fiddle substituting the lute and the viol, while bandleader Hutchings was fiercely determined to blend rock music with traditional Morris dance tunes.
Wood, who was spending the 1970s in rural Suffolk with his second wife Leslie and two little daughters, repeatedly tried to launch a solo career – but remained unhappy.
In 1976 he reunited with his former Young Tradition bandmate, Heather Wood (no relation), and the duo recorded an LP, “No Relation”, in 1977.
Soon, the two singers made up their minds to emigrate to the USA, a decision which brought the their musical career to a second blossom.
In America – a continent he had long adored – Wood’s stage appearance as “the singing scholar” finally fell into place. The Americans were curious to learn about the traditions of the British Isles, and enjoyed his mixture of lectures, unaccompanied ballads and concertina tunes – an instrument he had taught himself back in Suffolk.
Although Wood preferred warm fertile coastal areas over the ragged Scottish climate, he never forgot about his Scottish past.
He was always delighted about hearing Scottish-type pipe bands in America, was a particularly vocal supporter of the Canadian pipe band Na Cabarfeidh (later: Rare Air).
Two traditional Scottish folk ballads were also part of his own repertoire, which he both sang in dialect: ‘Johnny O’Breadislee’, the story of a poacher wounded by the king’s foresters, and the macabre ‘Twa Corbies’, the conversation of two ravens plucking a nobleman’s dead body.
When Wood, a great punster, switched into Scottish dialect on stage, it was always with a mixture of affection and humour, for instance when he revisited characters he had encountered in his Elgin youth in the improvised, rambling monologues he would squeeze between his songs.
A special concert highlight for the American audiences were what a local journalist described as “humorous readings of flagrantly bad Scottish poetry”: a copy of William McGonagall’s infamous 1880 poem ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’, known for its great pathos and strange rhymes, was always in Wood’s touring suitcase.
By the 1980s, his work as a folk singer had become a sideline for Wood, who was now married to the American artist Natasha Grossman, and happily working as an arts journalist in New York State.
When on April 10, 1990, Wood died at the age of 55 from injuries sustained in a tragic car accident – he had helped a stranded motorist on the emergency lane – a Scottish air served as his last post.
His friend, the renowned American composer David Amram (an associate of Leonard Bernstein, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and many others), bid him adieu with a rendition of ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ – the first verse of which also appears as an epitaph on Wood’s gravestone in Amenia, NY.
This year, Royston Wood – one of County Moray’s “lost stepsons” – would have been 90 years old, and his approach towards music remains vivid and inspiring.
On stage, he simultaneously was an entertainer and a music scholar, and argued that both belong together inextricably.
As a ballad singer, he honoured the ancient unaccompanied singing tradition, but also took the liberty of adding to the songs whatever he thought they needed.
Overall, one core thought seems to emanate from his entire œuvre: the elegance of classical music, the rootedness of folk music, and the esprit and verve of popular music are good companions to each other.
This article was written by Maximilian Bolch, a physician and amateur musician from Germany, who is currently working on a digital biography about Royston Wood.
This is developing on www.aboutroystonwood.com
Donations for the project can be made by going to www.gofundme.com and typing ‘Royston Wood’ in the search bar.