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Gay Woods | |
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| Birth name | Gabriel Corcoran |
| Born | 18 September 1948 Dublin, Ireland |
| Genres | British folk rock |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, Songwriter, Bandleader |
| Instrument(s) | Vocals Autoharp dulcimer concertina bodhran |
| Years active | 1963–present |
| Website | http://gaywoods.homestead.com/ |
Gay Woods (18 September 1948) is an Irish singer. She was one of the original members of Steeleye Span.
Gabriel Corcoran was born in Dublin, a neighbour of her future husband Terry Woods. Her elder brothers shared Woods' love of hillbilly music and blues. Corcoran and Woods performed together in 1963 at Dublin's Neptune Rowing club and got married in May 1968. Performing as a duo, they sang Carter Family songs and occasionally Irish songs. Terry Woods became a member of Sweeney's Men, who played English and American folk music, plus their own compositions. That summer the band performed at Cambridge Folk Festival. Gay Woods was not in the band. The following summer, the couple went to Keele folk festival where Woods met up with Ashley Hutchings who was then still with Fairport Convention. Terry Woods and Hutchings had an instant rapport.
The first tentative rehearsal for the new band which was to become Steeleye Span was early in November 1969. Johnny Moynihan, the Woods, Andy Irvine and Hutchings met at the Prince of Wales pub in Highgate. Next day Moynihan said he would not be joining Steeleye due to personal differences with Terry Woods[ citation needed ]. Irvine also dropped out, resuming a solo career prior to meeting Dónal Lunny, with whom he later formed a duo. [1] : 82–84 To replace them, Hutchings invited Bob and Carole Pegg, then the Dransfield brothers, and finally Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, who accepted. Hutchings' departure from Fairport Convention was revealed in NME on 22 November 1969. [2]
Gay Woods felt very neglected at this time, as Hart and Prior were still gigging as a duo, and she was the breadwinner after Sweeney's Men broke up in November. A friend of Terry Woods offered the new band a house in Winterbourne Stoke for rehearsals. Photographs taken that winter in the Wiltshire village appear on some editions of the liner notes of the album Hark! The Village Wait . In March 1970 there was a BBC radio session of the material, and they recorded it in April. The studio time was fraught, with disharmony evident between the two couples. [3] The Woodses went to Nottingham immediately after the recording, and received a phone call a week later to say they had been replaced by Martin Carthy. This rankled so much with Terry that he refused to appear in the grand reunion of Steeleye Span, The Journey, in 1995.[ citation needed ]
In the summer of 1970 Gay and Terry Woods joined Dr. Strangely Strange.. They gigged in the Netherlands and Germany. The band fell apart shortly afterwards. Terry Woods returned to Ireland to recruit Ed Deane and Pat Nash to his new project, The Woods Band. They recorded their only album in 1971. It was issued with a luxury gatefold embossed with gold Celtic designs. The record label, Greenwich, collapsed after the band had toured with the group Greenslade [ citation needed ]. The album received good reviews but poor sales[ citation needed ].
Reduced to a duo, they recorded four albums from 1975 to 1978 and a single. The songs are mostly their own compositions, with accompaniment on dulcimer, banjo and acoustic and electric guitars. Gay Woods had one stillbirth, then in 1979 she had a miscarriage[ citation needed ]. She returned to being a typist. In 1980, Terry and Gay Woods (then on Mulligan Records) approached Garvan Gallagher and Trevor Knight (then of Metropolis) about contributing to a new Woods Band demo. After recording these demo tapes, Gay Woods broke up with Terry Woods and formed a group, Auto Da Fe, with Trevor Knight and three Dutch musicians: Theo Wanders, Carel van Rijn and Wout Pennings. Their sound was New Romantic.. Their singles received strong airplay in Ireland, which guaranteed that their live concerts were profitable. There were eight singles, a compilation and an album, Tatitum. Phil Lynott and Midge Ure did some session work with them.
In 1987, Gay Woods gave birth to a child by Trevor Knight.
In 1994 she was asked to rejoin Steeleye Span, and after recording three albums plus a concert tour with them, she left them over financial issues.[ citation needed ]
She later studied for a degree in psychology at the University of Essex.[ citation needed ]
Steeleye Span :
The Woods Band :
Gay and Terry Woods :
Auto Da Fé :
Steeleye Span are a British folk rock band formed in 1969 in England by Fairport Convention bass player Ashley Hutchings and established London folk club duo Tim Hart and Maddy Prior. The band were part of the 1970s British folk revival, and were commercially successful in that period, with four Top 40 albums and two hit singles: "Gaudete" and "All Around My Hat".
Fairport Convention are an English folk rock band, formed in 1967 by guitarists Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol, bassist Ashley Hutchings and drummer Shaun Frater They started out influenced by American folk rock, with a set list dominated by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs and a sound that earned them the nickname "the British Jefferson Airplane". Vocalists Judy Dyble and Iain Matthews joined them before the recording of their self-titled debut in 1968; afterwards, Dyble was replaced by Sandy Denny, with Matthews later leaving during the recording of their third album.
Ashley Stephen Hutchings, MBE, sometimes known in early years by his nickname, "Tyger" Hutchings is an English bassist, vocalist, songwriter, arranger, band leader, writer and record producer. He was a founding member of three noteworthy English folk-rock bands: Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and The Albion Band. Hutchings has overseen numerous other projects, including records and live theatre, and has collaborated on film and television projects.
Sweeney's Men was an Irish traditional band. They emerged from the mid-1960s Irish roots revival, along with groups such as The Dubliners and the Clancy Brothers. The founding line-up in May 1966 was Johnny Moynihan, Andy Irvine and "Galway Joe" Dolan.
British folk rock is a form of folk rock which developed in the United Kingdom from the mid 1960s, and was at its most significant in the 1970s. Though the merging of folk and rock music came from several sources, it is widely regarded that the success of "The House of the Rising Sun" by British band the Animals in 1964 was a catalyst, prompting Bob Dylan to "go electric", in which, like the Animals, he brought folk and rock music together, from which other musicians followed. In the same year, the Beatles began incorporating overt folk influences into their music, most noticeably on their Beatles for Sale album. The Beatles and other British Invasion bands, in turn, influenced the American band the Byrds, who released their recording of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" in April 1965, setting off the mid-1960s American folk rock movement. A number of British groups, usually those associated with the British folk revival, moved into folk rock in the mid-1960s, including the Strawbs, Pentangle, and Fairport Convention.
Christopher Julian Leslie is a British folk rock musician. He joined Fairport Convention in 1997.
Peter Knight is a folk musician, a former member of British folk rock group Steeleye Span. Born in London, Knight learnt to play the violin and mandolin as a child before going to the Royal Academy of Music from 1960 to 1964. The recordings of the Irish fiddler Michael Coleman inspired him to take part in Irish pub sessions. He teamed up with guitarist and singer Bob Johnson until 1970 when he joined Steeleye Span. The parting was short-lived, as Johnson himself also joined Steeleye Span in 1972. Since 2016, he has performed as a duo with Bellowhead founder and melodeon player, John Spiers.
John Moynihan is an Irish folk singer, based in Dublin. He is often credited with introducing the bouzouki into Irish music in the mid-1960s.
Hark! The Village Wait is the debut album by the British folk rock band Steeleye Span, first released in 1970. It is the only album to feature the original lineup of the band as they broke up and reformed with an altered membership immediately after its release, without ever having performed live. Therefore, it is one of only two Steeleye Span studio albums to feature two female vocalists, the other being Time (1996). A similar sound was apparent years later when Prior teamed up with June Tabor to form Silly Sisters. Overall, the album's sound is essentially folk music with rock drumming and bass guitar added to some of the songs. The banjo features prominently on several tracks, including "Blackleg Miner", "Lowlands of Holland" and "One Night as I Lay on My Bed".
Please to See the King is the second album by Steeleye Span, released in 1971. A major personnel change following their previous effort, Hark! The Village Wait, brought about a substantial change in their overall sound, including a lack of drums and the replacement of one female vocalist with a male vocalist. The band even reprised a song from their debut, "The Blacksmith", with a strikingly different arrangement making extensive use of syncopation. Re-recording songs would be a minor theme in Steeleye's output over the years, with the band eventually releasing an entire album of reprises, Present – The Very Best of Steeleye Span.
Ten Man Mop or Mr. Reservoir Butler Rides Again is the third album by Steeleye Span, recorded in September 1971. It was issued on the short-lived Pegasus label, and then the Mooncrest label, also in 1971. It was not initially issued in the US until Chrysalis acquired the group's first three albums in 1975, when it reissued all three in the UK and US. Tracks like "Four Nights Drunk", "Marrowbones", and "Wee Weaver" are essentially pure folk. It was the last album to feature founding member Ashley Hutchings; he left the band in November 1971, just after its completion, partly because he felt that the album had moved too far toward Irish music and away from English music. The band was also considering touring America, and Hutchings was reluctant to make the trip.
The Albion Band, also known as The Albion Country Band, The Albion Dance Band, and The Albion Christmas Band, were a British folk rock band, originally brought together and led by musician Ashley Hutchings. Generally considered one of the most important groupings in the genre, it has contained or been associated with a large proportion of major English folk performers in its long and fluid history.
Mr Fox were an early 1970s British folk rock band. They were seen as in the 'second generation' of British folk rock performers and for a time were compared with Steeleye Span and Sandy Denny's Fotheringay. Unlike Steeleye Span they mainly wrote their own material in a traditional style and developed a distinct 'northern' variant of the genre. They demonstrate the impact and diversity of the British folk rock movement and the members went on to pursue significant careers within the folk rock and traditional music genres after they disbanded in 1972 having recorded two highly regarded albums.
Terence Woods is an Irish folk musician, songwriter/singer and multi-instrumentalist.
Liege & Lief is the fourth album by the British folk rock band Fairport Convention. It is the third album the group released in the UK during 1969, all of which prominently feature Sandy Denny as lead female vocalist, as well as the first to feature future long-serving personnel Dave Swarbrick and Dave Mattacks on violin/mandolin and drums, respectively, as full band members. It is also the first Fairport album on which all songs are either adapted (freely) from traditional British and Celtic folk material, or else are original compositions written and performed in a similar style. Although Denny and founding bass player Ashley Hutchings quit the band before the album's release, Fairport Convention has continued to the present day to make music strongly based within the British folk rock idiom, and are still the band most prominently associated with it.
Sails of Silver is the eleventh studio album by British folk rock band Steeleye Span. It was released in 1980 by Chrysalis Records. The album was produced two years after the band's ostensible break-up. At the request of Chrysalis Records Peter Knight and Bob Johnson both returned, replacing their own replacements Martin Carthy and John Kirkpatrick, who departed after the release of Live at Last. Despite being produced by Elton John's producer Gus Dudgeon, Sails of Silver was a commercial failure, and this proved a final straw for Tim Hart, who departed the band, leaving Maddy Prior as the band's sole remaining founding member.
Time is the fourteenth studio album by Steeleye Span. The album was released in 1996, after a seven-year hiatus, and was their first on the Park Records label. The impetus for the album was a 25th anniversary reunion tour the year before, during which most of the former members of the band performed together. Maddy Prior was experiencing voice problems so she spoke to Gay Woods, a founding member who had left the band after the first album, to rejoin. Woods initially resisted this move, since she had not performed publicly for some time, but Prior eventually prevailed and Woods returned to the band. The result was only the second Steeleye Span album to feature two female singers, which was used to very good effect on the ironic "Old Maid in the Garrett" and to a lesser extent on "The Prickly Bush" and "The Cutty Wren". Both, Prior and Woods, provide lead vocals on different songs. Priors' voice troubles are reflected in her musical choices on this album; she generally sings less powerfully and in a lower range, but still effectively. Woods also introduced a few Irish elements to the bands' repertoire, including the "Old Maid in the Garrett/Tam Lin reel" and her Bodhran. This album was to be Priors' last album with Steeleye Span until 2002's Present.
Horkstow Grange is an album by British folk rock band Steeleye Span.
The Guv'nor vol 1 is a compilation of recordings by English folk musician Ashley Hutchings.
The Woods Band was an Irish folk-rock band formed in 1970 by husband and wife team Gay & Terry Woods, shortly after their departure from Steeleye Span. The band played and recorded for four years before evolving into Gay & Terry Woods. In 2001, Terry Woods formed a new band and named it The Woods Band, which performed and recorded through 2003.
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