Abstract: This article broadly examines Graves’s relationship with the popular music of the 1960s in two ways:

first, by looking at his personal relationships with certain musicians of the era; second, by considering musicians’ creative responses to The White Goddess and how such responses confirmed Graves’s status as an inspiration to the emergent ‘counterculture’.

Keywords: popular music, jazz, folk music, progressive rock, The White Goddess, Bob Dylan, 1960s, counterculture

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Robert Graves had varied musical interests, as we learn from Tomás Graves’s fine memoir Tuning Up at Dawn.[1] There are stories of Tomás’s father singing English folksongs unaccompanied, like ‘The Lambs on the Green Hills’; stories about him visiting jazz clubs in Greenwich Village, on one occasion embracing pianist Cecil Taylor after a particularly impassioned gig. His abomination, we learn, was ‘canned music’ – a distaste that many discerning music-lovers share (Tuning, pp. 77, 23). This article will consider some of Graves’s personal associations with particular musicians and how his writings may have impacted those whose careers began in the 1960s.

Personal Contacts

First, a couple of examples which can be traced through the correspondence.

Isla Cameron was a Scottish folk singer and broadcaster and a friend of many years standing. Although she turned to acting in her later career, she was one of the pioneering figures in the postwar folk music revival in Britain. (Incidentally, Graves himself may be said to have contributed to that, for in 1954 he lent money to Mike Van Doren, the founder of the Troubadour Club in London, which by the 1960s had become a key venue for folksingers and singer-songwriters and is still flourishing today.)[2] Isla Cameron worked with Joan Littlewood, Ewan MacColl, and the visiting American folklorist Alan Lomax (whom Graves also knew). Graves dedicated several poems and lyrics to her, the best-known being ‘Counting the Beats’. (When she read that poem back to him, it reportedly reduced him to tears.[3]) His interest in the ballad form was longstanding – he had published a book on The English Ballad in the 1920s – and he looked to Cameron for her knowledge of the form.[4] In one letter he asks her to send the ‘unbowdlerized’ version of ‘John Anderson My Jo’ which he wants to use in one of his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry.[5] In another letter he offers her advice: ‘When you record your folksongs, have only there three people who love your singing best and most understandably in the place with you.’[6] Graves and Cameron shared a stage in London in 1966 at a fundraiser for the Mermaid Theatre. The compere on that occasion was Spike Milligan, and the letters to Milligan show Graves’s solicitude for Cameron’s mental health. Graves writes: ‘please please treat Isla with the utmost care and gentleness and honour as a pukka memsahib should be treated’.[7] (Here Graves may be seen teasing Milligan about the comedian’s upbringing in British-ruled India).

Isla Cameron is not as well known now as she should be. The same might be said of another friend, the jazz musician John Benson Brooks. He began his career as an arranger and songwriter. When there were plans afoot to make a film of The White Goddess (around 1960), Graves was keen that Brooks compose the score.[8] Brooks seems only to have released three albums under his own name. The first, Folk Jazz USA (1956), shows a continuity with Graves’s other interests, as it comprises modern jazz arrangements of traditional songs like ‘Shenandoah’. The final record, Avant Slant (1968), is very curious, combining live recording with sound effects, musique concrète, spoken word, and a contribution from Graves: a little lyric entitled ‘Mend Them Fences’. According to Time magazine:

At a Greenwich Village party a few years back, talk turned to the problems of a young girl. As he listened, poet-author Robert Graves scratched out on the back of an envelope verse far different from his customary classical approach. He then forgot about it. But composer-friend John Benson Brooks thought it such a hummer he recently put it to music. Now Decca has included it in an album called Avant Slant, due out next month.[9]

The lyric is only sampled on the album, occupying about a minute, but it features in the correspondence between the two men and a version was (apparently) sung by Annie Ross on Muses with Milligan in 1965, a BBC TV show, hosted by Spike, mixing jazz and poetry.[10] Graves sent Brooks a number of other lyrics in the hope that he would set them to music. He was also keen for Brooks to collaborate with Isla Cameron. In one letter from 1967 he writes: ‘[Isla]’s a good girl with bad taste in men and with her wonderful gift for song that fights against her ambitions as an actress.’[11] What does emerge from the letters to Brooks is that Graves’s appreciation of music was intuitive rather than informed by technical knowledge. This quote from 1966 is representative:

The trouble is that music men and painters and poets and real doctors always recognize each other, although it’s seldom that they talk the same language. It’s unusual really that ‘Cindy’ who’s a painter, can understand your music talk; but she can – better than I can understand it because I can’t play even a Jew’s-harp. But I do understand them and know what’s real, somehow, even it’s only a new way to cure warts; so I absorb your music somehow by osmosis (that’s a grand word) and could talk to you for hours on most subjects; in fact, as we did, those splendid mornings last year.[12]

One of the letters to Brooks encloses another letter from, in Graves’s words, ‘a young English (very English) drummer’.[13] This leads us to the main subject of this article, which is Graves’s connections to the new emergent genres of the 1960s. It is a truism to say that the decade was a period of dizzyingly fast development in popular music. New terminology was needed to encompass ‘hard rock’, ‘folk-rock’, ‘progressive’ rock and so on, as well as a new breed of ‘singer-songwriters’. The young ‘very English’ drummer in this case was Robert Wyatt, son of Honor Wyatt, a journalist friend of Graves’s dating back to his years with Laura Riding. Young Wyatt came out to Mallorca in 1962 and enjoyed Graves’s hospitality; he had drumming lessons from Ramón Farrán (Graves’s future son-in-law) and was nicknamed ‘Batty’ (from batería, Spanish for drum kit).[14] In later interviews, Wyatt has described how he was awestruck by Graves: ‘A magnificent bloke, bit of a giant. Fantastically handsome. I remember him leaping down the side of the mountain, like a goat, when everyone else was clambering [….] He really, quite obviously, was your proper great man.’[15] There are, happily, three items from Batty in the St John’s archive – two letters and a postcard, dating from 1963–4. They are all concerned with asking (very politely) for loans of money, which Graves evidently agreed to. Elsewhere I have also found one letter from Graves to Wyatt. Dating from August 1963, it concerns repayment of the loan, the opening of the Indigo Jazz Club in Palma (another venture that Graves subsidized), a visit to Mallorca by jazz musician Ronnie Scott, Wyatt’s hopes of marriage (he was only eighteen at the time) and commiserations on the death of his father, George Ellidge.[16]

When Wyatt returned to Mallorca for another stay (in 1964) he brought a friend, Kevin Ayers. The pair lived in a fisherman’s hut with no water or electricity. That same summer brought another musician friend of theirs to Mallorca, the Australian Daevid Allen, who had previously been a lodger at Honor Wyatt’s.[17] Now, like so much rock history, the story grows complicated, as personnel overlap and interact, but the origin story is clear enough: in 1966 these three men were the founder members of Soft Machine, one of the most influential avant-garde bands of the late 60s, known for free-form improvisation and jazz-inflected harmonies unusual in rock music. And here again, there is a Graves connection. The first known public performance by Soft Machine was in Kingston, outer London, at the Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences, a building that had been gifted to Idries Shah, the Sufi teacher who had by now become a close friend of Graves’s.[18]

The founder members of Soft Machine went in different directions later, pursuing solo careers or work in new ensembles, but Graves and Mallorca continued to act as a magnet. Allen returned several times. After some sort of LSD-induced epiphany in Deià in 1966, he developed a bizarre personal mythology, centred on the ‘Planet Gong’ and formed a band – Gong – which in turn splintered into several other musical subsets. His partner Gilli Smyth, also part of this community, recorded a solo album, Mother, in Deià in 1978 which has Gravesian tracks such as ‘Time of the Goddess’. In the late 1970s Ayers also returned, releasing four albums during his later time in Deià, the last titled Deia Vu (a neat pun on ‘déjà vu’).[19]

Looking at Soft Machine’s founders, it is debatable whether one can trace any direct influence of Graves’s writings in their own work. Wyatt owes much to Surrealism, the ‘pataphysics’ of Alfred Jarry, the comic subversiveness of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Certainly, Allen’s 1977 solo album Now Is the Happiest Time of Your Life shows at least an indirect influence, concluding with a track ‘Deya Goddess’ which he dedicates, in (perhaps) Gravesian fashion, to the ‘mysteries’ and ‘marvels’ of the moon goddess Diana.

The White Goddess

Robert Wyatt thought highly of The White Goddess, telling his biographer how the book ‘gave me a sense of the world, not just as a geographical place but as an endless story of amazing myths, and different states of mind.’[20] The appearance of the third English edition of The White Goddess in paperback in 1961 was propitious. This ‘historical grammar of poetic myth’ would acquire cult status in the decade that followed, echoing the zeitgeist as neo-paganism and feminism gained ground. In his interview with Playboy in 1970, Graves chuckled over the idea that there were some ‘hopeful young people’ in California who had taken The White Goddess as their Bible, holding ‘wildwood celebrations’ in her honour.[21] As William Graves reminds us in Wild Olives, although the book made him a cult symbol to some, his father was no ‘Beatnik guru’ himself.[22]

It is worthwhile to collate some examples of how the book was received among musicians at the time.

The guitarist John Renbourn was best known as part of the 60s jazz-folk band Pentangle. Reminiscing about those days in a Guardian interview, Renbourn emphasised that he and his fellow musicians didn’t spend time agonising over whether the folk music tradition should be preserved in aspic or updated; but ‘there was discussion about the books of the day: The White Goddess, which was to do with poetic myth and intuition; and another book called From Ritual to Romance – it talked about the Grail story as a parallel to your own life.’ [23]

Richard Thompson was a founder-member of folk-rock band Fairport Convention before quitting in the early 1970s to begin a mostly solo career that continues to this day. A biographer asked him about early influences. He replied: ‘Yeats, Eliot, Graves – all grammar school curriculum, all taught with love and enthusiasm by an English Department that cared about that stuff […] The White Goddess, The Golden Bough – absolutely! These were required reading in the ’60s.’[24]

Donovan was hailed in the 1960s as Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan. He has described how, from the age of fourteen or fifteen, he started to spend time with older bohemians and absorbing what they read. On the release of a new album, Gaelia, in 2022 he confirmed that Graves remained his guiding light and more especially The White Goddess, that ‘curious, unusual book’. Never a man overburdened with modesty, he declared:

Not only did I wish to continue that crazy ridiculed job that Robert Graves began in the 1940s […], I found I am, like Robert Graves, re-establishing the true poetic theme, the celebration of the four seasons of the earth, which human beings, in their great error, are not continuing to honour.[25]

In the late 60s Marianne Faithfull was famously involved with Mick Jagger. At the same time her great friend the actress and model Anita Pallenberg was dating Keith Richards, Rolling Stones guitarist. In her autobiography Faithfull recorded how, while their menfolk were busy in the studio, she and Pallenberg were left feeling useless and ornamental:

I had a great deal more in common with Anita than I did with Mick. Anita and I would spend the day reading passages from The White Goddess out loud to each other. That’s what we loved to talk about: phases of the moon, alphabet dolmens and mnemonic finger poems. That was our stuff. We didn’t speak about it in front of other people.[26]

Faithfull’s mother died in 1991. Faithfull was on tour in Australia at the time and rushed home. On the plane back to England, she claims, she re-read The White Goddess ‘in honour of my mother who was for me a form of the goddess: the infinite, shapeshifting spirit that for the Celtic bards imbues life.’[27]

In 1969 Faithfull was in Australia with Jagger, who was filming The Ballad of Ned Kelly, in which he played the title role. During the shoot, director Tony Richardson was also trying to set up a film version of I, Claudius. Graves wrote to Julia Simonne, his final ‘muse’, that Faithfull might appear in the film. From other sources we learn that Jagger hoped to play Caligula (!) The I, Claudius film was never made.[28]

The Incredible String Band were a cult band of the era – essentially, for much of their lifespan, a duo of Mike Heron and Robin Williamson. Hailed nowadays as precursors of the ‘World Music’ genre, they played exotic instruments and experimented with non-western scales and vocal techniques. Williamson has said that he first encountered The White Goddess at the age of nineteen, but he did not read it thoroughly until years later.[29] It (arguably) informs his own songwriting, as illustrated by an example from the Incredible String Band’s 1969 album Changing Horses. The whole second side is taken up with a sprawling Williamson composition entitled ‘Creation’. Reading the lyrics, one notices the emphasis on a female Demiurge:

The first day was golden

And she coloured the Sun

And she named it Hyperion

And she made it a day of light and healing

[…]

The second was silver

And she coloured the Moon

And she named it Phoebe

And she made a day of enchantment and the living waters.

I would suggest an indebtedness here to Chapter 15 of The White Goddess, where Graves develops the notion that the seven pillars of Wisdom are identified by Hebrew mystics with the seven days of Creation and with the seven days of the week, and each day of the week is linked to one of the heavenly bodies.[30] Scholars of the Incredible String Band (and such there are) claim that, apart from ‘Creation’, at least three of Williamson’s other songs derive ideas from Graves.[31] However, when I spoke to Williamson in 2024, he was friendly but like many another songwriter (rightly) wary of attempts to ‘analyse’ his work into its components.

Suspicion might also hang over some of the other musicians who, it has been suggested, drew influence from The White Goddess: Marc Bolan, for example, in his elfin hippie persona of the 1960s before he evolved into the ‘Glam Rock’ pioneer of T. Rex a few years later.[32] Or Nick Drake, the reclusive singer-songwriter who died at the age of twenty-six and is now the object of cultic devotion.[33] Commentators have convinced themselves that these and other artists read and processed The White Goddess. Often it may be that Graves’s ideas – primitive matriarchy, goddess-worship as prior to and superior to god-worship – were ‘in the air’. For instance, Laura Nyro, an American singer-songwriter who came to international prominence at this time, had a track ‘Triple Goddess Twilight’ on her final album, released posthumously; but while Nyro’s known interest in esoterica may have led her to Graves, the song’s origins could as well lie in varieties of feminist spirituality that gained traction from the 1970s onwards.[34]

Dylan

Finally, we come to a musician who needs no introduction – someone who allegedly met Graves and allegedly drew inspiration from him – Bob Dylan. Dylan is a slippery individual. In his public utterances he is self-contradictory and deliberately, one might almost say pathologically, evasive. On top of that, he is the focus of a huge hermeneutic industry. Books on his life and work regularly run to 700 or 800 pages. The first question is: when did Dylan meet Graves, if indeed they ever met? In his autobiography, Chronicles Volume I (a typically mischievous title, as we are unlikely to see a ‘Chronicles II’), Dylan says:

I read The White Goddess by Robert Graves [.…] Invoking the poetic muse was something I didn’t know about yet. Didn’t know enough to start trouble with it, anyway. In a few years’ time I would meet Robert Graves himself in London. We went out for a brisk walk around Paddington Square. I wanted to ask him about some of the things in his book, but I couldn’t remember much about it.[35]

(There was no ‘Paddington Square’ in London at the time.) Chronicles was published in 2004. Almost forty years earlier, Dylan had given an interview where he told a completely different story:

I met him [Graves] in England. He talked to somebody while I was singing ‘Hollis Brown’. And I didn't even know who Robert Graves was. I was singing for a few people, and he was there. He got up and talked to four young guys who called themselves ‘professionals’. They sang in The Blue Angel, or something like that. One played the accordion, one played the string bass and one played the Gretsch rhythm guitar, and the other one sang and played slide trombone. And Robert Graves went over and talked to them, to find out about music, while I was singing ‘Hollis Brown’. So I stopped singing and said: ‘Who’s that guy?’[36]

The ‘professionals’ he refers to so disdainfully must be Los Valldemosa, the Mallorcan folk group who did indeed have a residency at a London club, The Blue Angel. This unpleasant incident supposedly happened on the occasion of Dylan’s first visit to London over Christmas 1962/New Year ‘63 at the home of folksinger Rory McEwen (who was a friend of Isla Cameron). The Dylanologists date it to January 2nd or 3rd 1963.[37] We know from Graves’s diary and passport stamps that, after visiting London over Christmas, he was back in Mallorca by then.

The next story, which began on the Internet and has filtered into at least one book, dates from a year later, January 1964.[38] Dylan had just released his album The Times They Are A-Changin’, and, notwithstanding the previous rebuff, determined to show Graves that a folk singer could be a poet too. So, clutching the album (which included ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’, the song that failed to capture Graves’s interest the year before), he boarded a plane, travelled to Mallorca, presented himself in Deià, where Graves, feeling ill, refused to see him. The only points in favour of this dubious tale are that Dylan’s diary was unusually blank in January 1964 and Graves’s diary for 15 January contains the single-word entry: ‘unwell’.

The final story, which is of unimpeachable integrity because it comes from Tomás Graves’s book, is that in the late 1970s Dylan was toying with the idea of recording an album in Spanish. He asked Columbia (his record company) to send Graves his complete discography in the hope of getting Graves to translate the songs. Tomás writes: ‘Robert was in his eighties by then and not interested, but I enjoyed the luxury of playing pristine copies of the first dozen Dylan albums.’[39]

Was Dylan ‘influenced’ by Graves’s writings? Peter Stampfel (later with the band The Holy Modal Rounders) claims to have pointed the young singer towards The White Goddess when he arrived in Greenwich Village in the early 60s.[40] Hans Fried, folk enthusiast and future archivist, recalls a chance encounter with Dylan in Collett’s music shop on Dylan’s first London visit. Fried was clasping a copy of The White Goddess. Dylan looked over, showed interest, then asked whether Fried had read it. The book served as an ‘icebreaker,’ and the two men retired to a coffee bar and spent ‘about three hours, talking about poetry.’[41]

In a learned analysis of Dylan’s 1976 album Desire, the critic Robert Shelton argues that it is suffused with Gravesian thoughts.[42] He draws attention to one song in particular, ‘Isis’, that tells of a man who marries an enigmatic woman (‘a mystical child’) named Isis. The story covers his separation from her, his subsequent adventure and, ultimately, his return. There is indeed some symmetry here with the Isis-Osiris story that Graves found embedded in many cultures – the sacred king as the moon goddess’s divine victim – although no proof of where Dylan came by these ideas. At around the same time (the mid-1970s) Dylan made a film called Renaldo and Clara, which combined concert footage and documentary interviews with dramatic fictional vignettes. Originally four hours long, it has rarely been screened since its premiere. Reportedly, in the fictional scenes, Dylan’s then wife Sara played a kind of Woman in White figure. The film’s associate producer told reporters at the time: ‘Sara is very much into Robert Graves and his notion of the muse […] that’s probably a big part of their relationship.’ And according to Allen Ginsberg, who was also involved in this quixotic project, one of the scenes cut from the final film was ‘Sara on the Mother Goddess’, along with another scene that would have made the connection explicit. Other accounts say that the film made self-conscious use of white, red and black imagery, representing the triple aspect of the Goddess.[43]

In conclusion, it is fair to say that, whether through personal contacts or through his writings, Robert Graves impacted musicians in the 1960s, in ways that continue to this day – and in ways that deserve further investigation.

A version of this paper was delivered at ‘Robert Graves and the Popular Imagination’, the Sixteenth International Robert Graves Conference, at St John’s College, Oxford, UK, 15–18 September 2024.

Philip Ward is an author and independent researcher with interests in literature and music. His publications include books on Sandy Denny, Laura Nyro and Michael Arlen as well as translations of Frank Wedekind and a volume of essays, Instead of a Critic. He is a Senior Member of Wolfson College, Cambridge.