There is a moment near the end of “A Lyke Wake Dirge” where Jacqui McShee’s voice stops being a human voice and becomes something else entirely — something older, something that has no particular interest in whether you’re comfortable.
That’s the album in miniature.
What They Built in 1968
Pentangle formed in London in 1967 as a kind of impossible bet: that you could take two of the finest acoustic guitarists in Britain, add a jazz rhythm section, put a classical-trained singer in front, and make music that didn’t sound like a compromise. John Renbourn and Bert Jansch were already legends in the folk clubs, playing a fingerpicking style that borrowed openly from blues and jazz and didn’t apologize for it. Danny Thompson on upright bass had been playing modern jazz with Alexis Korner. Terry Cox on drums was subtle enough to have worked in cabaret and smart enough to know that silence was a form of percussion. The whole thing should have been a mess.
It wasn’t.
The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter was their second album, recorded at Marble Arch Studios in London in early 1968, produced by Shel Talmy — the American who had already put his stamp on the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and The Who’s first records. Talmy’s instinct here was restraint. He understood that what made this group extraordinary was the room they gave each other, and he had the engineering sense not to fill up that room with anything unnecessary.
Five People, One Instrument
The guitar interplay between Jansch and Renbourn is the structural miracle at the center of this record. On “Sovay” they weave around each other with a casualness that disguises the years of practice underneath it. Jansch was the rougher one, slightly ragged at the edges in the best way, playing like a man who learned in a hurry because the music was urgent. Renbourn was more studied, more medieval in his reference points, already obsessed with the modal traditions that would later define his solo work.
Terry Cox’s brushwork on tracks like “Wake Up This Morning” — a slow-burning blues with no particular interest in being a proper blues — is some of the most controlled drumming on any record of this era. He barely touches the kit and somehow fills the room anyway.
Thompson’s bass is the spine. Upright, acoustic, insistent without being pushy. He played jazz the way a good cook uses salt.
The Voice
Jacqui McShee hadn’t been a professional singer very long when this was recorded. She’d been singing folk in the clubs, found Jansch and Renbourn’s orbit, and suddenly found herself in front of a microphone in a proper studio making something that the music press genuinely didn’t know what to call. Her voice is not a warm instrument. It’s clear and a little severe, like winter light. On “In Time” she’s almost conversational. On “The Heron” she is absolutely not.
“A Lyke Wake Dirge” is the track that will either make this album yours or send you looking for something easier. It’s a North Yorkshire funeral chant of genuinely medieval origin, performed here over drone and jazz percussion, running seven and a half minutes, going somewhere very dark and not particularly hurrying back. Some nights it sounds like the greatest thing I own. Other nights I have to pick up the needle and put on something that wants me to be alright.
This record has been reissued many times but it came from a specific London moment — folk clubs in Soho, late nights in Cousins, a city briefly willing to entertain the idea that acoustic music could be experimental and that tradition and innovation were not opposites.
That moment lasted maybe four years. They caught it on tape.