In 1976, Richard Thompson’s glory days looked long behind him. The guitarist who had electrified folk music with Fairport Convention and then made a series of bleak albums with his wife Linda was living in a tiny cottage in Suffolk with her and their children, selling their chickens’ eggs to the village shop. “This old tramp used to come round every three to six months,” Thompson recalled to me many years later in a London pub, “and he’d stay with us. He was a great old boy. He had amazing stories.”
Ted, the tramp, dreamt of settling down in a caravan and putting down roots; he never did. “But also, in the Sixties, the thing was ‘getting your head together in the country’: there were these mythological women, like [folk singers] Vashti Bunyan or Annie Briggs, who would disappear for years in caravans, go off to Ireland or live on a farm and you’d never see them again.”
Years passed. The Thompsons divorced. Richard returned to music, making a series of solo albums through the 1980s to (slightly) diminishing returns. Then, he drew for inspiration on Ted and on Annie Briggs and that “rural underclass landscape”, and wrote “Beeswing”.
In the summer of love, the song’s narrator comes to Dundee and falls in love with a laundry worker, as “fine as a bee’s wing”. They go on the road, busking and fruit picking and tinkering. He wants to settle down and have a family; she refuses. “As long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay.” After a drunken quarrel she leaves. Now he hears only rumors of her, sleeping rough; once marrying but finding “even a gypsy caravan was too much settling down”. Free-spiritedness shades into solipsism. And yet he remains obsessed.
The song’s parent album, 1994’s Mirror Blue, was not well received, and the delicate “Beeswing” was lost amid its general clatter. But the song persisted. When he played it on tour that year, usually straight after the rambunctious “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”, with Pete Zorn’s pennywhistle solo hinting at the voice of the beloved, audiences hushed. It became one of the highlights of his songbook, and lent the title to his 2021 autobiography. At his 70th birthday concert in 2019, he played it as a duet with Alistair Anderson on squeezebox, the two of them lit as if by moonlight, a moment of stillness in a celebratory night. From: https://ig.ft.com/life-of-a-song/beeswing.html
