Davy Graham Guitars & Gear: The Complete Guide to the Father of DADGAD and British Folk Guitar

In the early 1960s, a young mixed-race British guitarist from Leicestershire traveled to Morocco and sat with oud players in the medinas, listening to the specific quarter-tone scales and droning open-string resonances of North African music. He had a guitar with him. He wanted to translate what the oud players were doing — the characteristic open-string drone beneath a melody, the ambiguous modal tonality that was neither major nor minor — into his own instrument’s vocabulary. He retuned the strings: low string down to D, third string down to G, second string down to A, high string down to D. The result was D-A-D-G-A-D. Every string produced a note of a Dsus4 chord. Open strings rang in modal sympathy across the entire register. The guitar suddenly sounded like it could hold a drone beneath a melody the way the oud held drones beneath its lines. He played. It worked.

That guitarist was Davy Graham, born David Michael Gordon Graham on November 26, 1940, in Market Bosworth, Leicestershire. The tuning he developed — DADGAD — is now one of the most widely used alternate tunings in acoustic guitar playing. Jimmy Page used it for “White Summer,” which became “Kashmir.” Every Celtic fingerpicker who wants that ambiguous, droning, modal sound uses it. Every guitarist who works in world music and wants the guitar to accommodate non-Western scales reaches for it. Hundreds of thousands of players learn it every year without knowing who invented it, or under what circumstances, or what he was trying to translate when he lowered those strings in Morocco sometime around 1964.

Davy Graham’s gear story is primarily the story of acoustic guitars — steel-string instruments played without amplification, in folk clubs and concert halls and eventually in diminished circumstances as addiction and poverty reduced his circumstances. He never sought fame in the conventional sense. He was not interested in a record label’s commercial priorities. He was interested in playing music — all kinds of music, the whole world’s music — with an acoustic guitar, and the gear through which he pursued that interest is as honest and as specific as the music itself. This is the complete guide to those instruments and to the musician who used them to change what acoustic guitar playing meant in Britain.

Background: Skid Row to Soho, Morocco to the British Folk Revival

Graham’s background was genuinely unusual for the British folk scene of the early 1960s. His mother was Guyanese, his father Scottish — a mixed-race child in post-war Leicestershire, at a time when such backgrounds were genuinely unusual in the British Midlands. He encountered the guitar at twelve when a family friend played for him, and became obsessed immediately. He taught himself from recordings, absorbing Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Muddy Waters as his blues foundation, and then Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk as his jazz vocabulary. This combination — American acoustic blues and bebop jazz applied to an acoustic folk guitar — was already unusual before he had heard a note of North African music or Indian classical music.

He left school at eighteen and began traveling: Greece, North Africa, the streets of Paris. He played in clubs around London’s Soho district — Les Cousins in the basement of a Greek Street restaurant was the primary folk club, and Graham was its resident genius. He was simultaneously playing Lead Belly, Reverend Gary Davis, and jazz standards on an acoustic steel-string guitar, with a technique that drew on all of them simultaneously. No other guitarist in Britain was doing this. The folk revival was largely focused on traditional British and Irish song; Graham was reaching across continents and genres in a way that seemed almost incomprehensible to most of his contemporaries.

His 1962 EP 3/4 AD introduced “Anji” — a fingerstyle instrumental piece that became, for a period in the 1960s, the prerequisite of joining many British folk clubs. If you could play “Anji,” you were serious about guitar. Bert Jansch learned it and recorded it. Paul Simon learned it and included his version (as “Anji”) on Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence album (1966). John Renbourn learned it. Martin Carthy learned it. The piece functioned as both a demonstration of fingerpicking technique and an initiation into a specific tradition of advanced acoustic guitar playing that Graham had effectively invented.

His most important album, Folk, Blues and Beyond (Decca, 1965), is one of the defining records of the 20th century. It moves from Lead Belly’s “Leavin’ Blues” to Reverend Gary Davis’s “Cocaine” to a Pakistani thumri to an Indian raga to Big Bill Broonzy’s “Rock Me Baby” — not as a novelty or a stylistic exercise but as the natural expression of a musician for whom all of these traditions were equally valid sources of material and technique. No other acoustic guitarist had made a record like it. Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, John Renbourn, Martin Carthy, John Martyn, Richard Thompson, Paul Simon, and Jimmy Page all cite it as formative.

The personal story is darker. Graham struggled with heroin addiction through much of the 1970s, which effectively removed him from the music scene at a time when his influence was at its height. He suffered a burglary that took many of his guitars and left him, at one point, with only a cheap Hohner nylon-string. He engaged in charity work and teaching. He returned to touring and recording in the years before his death — his final album, Broken Biscuits, was released in 2007. He died on December 15, 2008, at sixty-eight years old. John Renbourn’s assessment of his significance was characteristically precise: “If Davy had done little else except become the inventor of DADGAD, his immortality would still be assured.”

The Rig: Davy Graham’s Guitars and Instruments

Guitars

Gibson J-45 / J-50 (Early Primary Guitar, Natural Top): Graham’s most documented and most photographed guitar from his peak period in the early-to-mid 1960s was a natural-top Gibson J-45 or J-50 — the two models are closely related, the J-50 being essentially a J-45 with a natural rather than sunburst finish. The Gibson J-45 is a mid-size dreadnought with a mahogany back and sides and a spruce top, one of the most straightforward and working-musician-practical acoustic guitars Gibson has ever made. The J-50’s natural top reveals the spruce’s grain and color in a way the sunburst J-45 obscures, and it produces a slightly different tonal coloring — marginally brighter, the spruce’s natural character more visible to the ear as well as the eye. For Graham’s specific use — fingerpicking across multiple styles, from blues to jazz to raga to Celtic — the J-45/J-50’s warm, balanced response and comfortable playability made it an ideal all-purpose instrument. The mahogany back and sides provide warmth rather than the crisp projection of rosewood, suiting the intimate club environments in which Graham primarily performed.

Martin D-1 (Mid-Career Acoustic): A Martin D-1 appears in Graham’s documented guitar collection — a straightforward entry-level dreadnought from Martin, with laminated mahogany back and sides rather than solid wood. The D-1 is not a prestigious instrument; it is a working guitar, affordable and reliable. That Graham used one — rather than a more expensive Martin model — is consistent with his general indifference to instrument prestige and his focus on the music rather than the equipment. The Martin dreadnought body gives more bass projection than the Gibson J-45, a different balance between register response that would have suited certain repertoire contexts differently.

Martin OM “Davy Graham Model” (Later Career Custom): A custom Martin OM model associated with Graham’s name appears in later-career documentation — an orchestral model (OM) body size, which is smaller and less bass-heavy than the dreadnought, with the specific balance and clarity that makes the OM format preferred by fingerpickers who want each note of complex arrangements to be individually clear. The OM body’s smaller size and more balanced frequency response make it genuinely better suited to fingerstyle work than the dreadnought — less low-end bloom that can muddy fast fingerpicking patterns, more note separation in the midrange where fingerstyle melody lines live. The fact that Martin eventually produced a model associated with Graham’s name reflects his eventual, if belated, recognition as one of the most important acoustic guitarists of the postwar era.

Fylde Orsino and Falstaff (Late Career Instruments): In his later career, Graham used guitars built by Fylde Guitars — a small British acoustic guitar manufacturer based in Lancashire, known for high-quality hand-built instruments in the tradition of pre-war Martin and Gibson designs. The Fylde Orsino and Falstaff are both steel-string acoustic models: the Orsino a smaller-bodied instrument, the Falstaff a dreadnought. Fylde’s instruments are characterized by their specific British tonal character — warm, sustaining, with a clarity that suits fingerstyle work — and their use of British and European tonewoods alongside traditional American species. For a British guitarist in the later stages of his career, choosing a British luthier’s instruments over American factory guitars was both a practical and a symbolic choice.

Cheap Hohner Nylon-String (Post-Burglary Poverty Period): One of the more poignant documented facts about Graham’s gear is that after a burglary in his later years — which took most of his guitars — he was left with only a cheap Hohner nylon-string guitar. This is documented through a specific account: a guitarist who promoted music nights in London met Graham around 2004 and found him playing the Hohner. Impressed with the guitarist’s Martin, Graham asked to use it and eventually the guitarist gave it to him outright: “Davy needed it and liked it, so I gave it to him.” That a guitarist of Graham’s historical importance was playing a cheap nylon-string because he could not afford better is a direct consequence of the addiction that consumed much of his productive career and the financial precarity that followed. The story is also a demonstration that Graham’s playing was recognizable as Graham’s playing on whatever instrument he held: the Hohner was still Davy Graham’s guitar.

Nylon-String Classical Guitars (Early Influence, Continuing Use): Graham first played classical guitar at age twelve, and the classical guitar tradition — the specific left-hand fretting technique, the nail-on-string attack, the melodic linearity of classical guitar arrangement — remained part of his vocabulary throughout his career. His recordings include nylon-string work alongside steel-string, and his technique shows classical guitar influence in the way he constructs melodic lines and manages the relationship between bass and treble voices in fingerstyle arrangements. The nylon-string’s warmer, rounder attack and the different physical feel of nylon versus steel informed his approach to both types of instrument.

Playing Without Amplification: Graham’s primary context was acoustic performance in folk clubs and concert halls — environments where the guitar’s natural acoustic projection was the primary amplification. He did not use amplification as a standard component of his setup, and his guitar choices reflect this: instruments chosen for their acoustic projection and tonal character in an unamplified context rather than their compatibility with pickups and amplifiers. This is consistent with the British folk revival’s general aesthetic of acoustic authenticity — a deliberate rejection of the electric amplification that characterized American blues and rock.

Technique and the DADGAD Tuning: The Most Important Gear Decision

DADGAD Tuning (D-A-D-G-A-D, Invented in Morocco c.1964): If any element of Davy Graham’s gear deserves extended treatment, it is the tuning system he developed and popularized — DADGAD. While conventionally thought of as a tuning rather than a piece of gear, DADGAD is in practice a fundamental modification of how the instrument functions, comparable in its effect to the physical modifications that define other instruments’ identities.

Standard tuning (E-A-D-G-B-E) produces a guitar optimized for Western tonal harmony — the tuning gives easy access to the chord voicings of Western functional harmony, with the major and minor chords of European music available in compact, efficient shapes. DADGAD (D-A-D-G-A-D) produces something entirely different: every open string is a note of a Dsus4 chord, and the guitar’s open state is tonally ambiguous — neither major nor minor, but suspended, droning, modal. Open strings ring sympathetically with fretted notes in ways that standard tuning cannot produce. The bass strings provide a sustained drone beneath melodic activity on the treble strings, as the oud does in North African and Middle Eastern music.

Graham developed DADGAD specifically to translate oud music to guitar — to find a guitar tuning that would produce the droning, modal quality of the oud without requiring the guitarist to retune to a simple open chord. The oud’s tuning in perfect fourths, and the droning quality that North African musicians extract from open strings beneath melodic lines, pointed Graham toward a tuning that could do something similar on a Western guitar. DADGAD was the answer: the open strings form a chord that can function as a drone in multiple modal contexts, and the specific intervals between strings give easy access to the scale patterns of non-Western music.

Jimmy Page heard Graham’s use of DADGAD and applied it directly: “White Summer” — Page’s solo adaptation of the Irish air “She Moved Through the Fair,” based specifically on Graham’s 1963 arrangement — uses DADGAD and was recorded by the Yardbirds in 1967. Page subsequently played “White Summer” at nearly every Led Zeppelin concert, integrating it into a medley with “Black Mountain Side.” “Over the Hills and Far Away” (Led Zeppelin IV) was developed partly from “White Summer.” And the modal, droning quality that characterizes “Kashmir” — arguably Led Zeppelin’s most celebrated piece — draws on the same DADGAD-enabled modal thinking that Graham introduced to British guitarists. The connection from Graham’s Moroccan hotel room to “Kashmir” is direct and documented.

Playing Style & Tone Philosophy

Davy Graham’s playing was the fullest early expression of what would later be called “world music” guitar — the use of an acoustic steel-string guitar as a vehicle for multiple non-Western musical traditions simultaneously. His specific synthesis drew on American Delta blues (the fingerpicking patterns, the bent notes, the call-and-response between bass and treble), bebop jazz (the harmonic vocabulary, the chromatic passing tones, the improvisational approach to melody), Celtic folk (the modal scales, the droning open strings, the specific melodic ornaments of the British Isles tradition), and Indian and North African music (the raga scales, the drone bass, the microtonal inflections that the guitar could approximate but never quite achieve).

His fingerpicking technique was rooted in the Travis-picking alternating bass model that he learned from Merle Travis recordings and Big Bill Broonzy — the same fingerpicking school that shaped his contemporaries. But Graham’s application of this technical foundation to non-Western scales and modal music was genuinely unprecedented. No other British guitarist of his generation was using Travis picking to play Indian ragas or Moroccan-influenced modal pieces. He was inventing a new vocabulary as he went, without a tradition to draw on or a teacher to consult, using only his ear and his understanding of multiple musical systems simultaneously.

His tone philosophy was the folk musician’s philosophy: the guitar’s natural acoustic character, unamplified, in a room. The specific warmth of mahogany back and sides, the specific attack of a spruce top under steel strings played with fingertips and nails — these were the tonal parameters of his sound. He was not interested in amplification’s possibilities or in the electric guitar’s sustain and distortion vocabulary. He was interested in what an acoustic guitar could do in a room, with human ears, at a human scale.

How to Sound Like Davy Graham

Guitar: A steel-string acoustic in the dreadnought or orchestra model (OM) size, with mahogany back and sides and a spruce top. The Gibson J-45 is the authentic starting point. The Martin OM-18 (mahogany back and sides, OM body) is an excellent alternative that specifically suits the fingerstyle work Graham did. Modern equivalents: the Gibson J-45 Standard, the Martin 000-18, or any quality steel-string acoustic with the warm-but-clear tonal character that suits fingerpicking.

Tuning: DADGAD. Retune: low E down to D, A stays, D stays, G stays, B down to A, high E down to D. The resulting Dsus4 open chord gives you Graham’s modal foundation. Explore how open strings can function as drones beneath fretted melody notes on the treble strings — this drone-plus-melody interaction is the core of DADGAD’s tonal character.

Amp Settings (If Amplifying):

Technique: The alternating bass fingerpicking foundation — thumb on bass strings, index and middle fingers on treble — is the physical starting point. Practice maintaining the bass pattern independently while the fingers develop melodic content on the treble strings. Then begin introducing DADGAD’s drone possibilities: let open strings ring sympathetically while fretted notes provide melody. Study “Anji” in standard notation and tablature — it remains the clearest single demonstration of Graham’s approach to bass-treble independence and his specific way of constructing melodic lines over a moving bass.

Influence & Legacy

Davy Graham’s influence is one of the most pervasive and least acknowledged in the history of the guitar. The players who cite him form an extraordinary list, and the specific elements of his influence — DADGAD, the multi-genre synthesis, the folk-baroque approach to fingerpicking — run through major bodies of work that most listeners know without knowing where they come from.

Bert Jansch — one of the most important British folk guitarists, whose playing shaped Nick Drake, Led Zeppelin’s acoustic approach, and essentially the entire British acoustic guitar tradition of the 1970s — learned “Anji” from Graham and absorbed his multi-genre approach. The connection from Graham to Jansch to Nick Drake (who appears in Series 1) is direct and specific: Drake’s guitar tunings, his modal approach, his fingerpicking technique all bear Jansch’s Graham-influenced fingerprints.

Jimmy Page — who appears in Series 1 of this guide — based “White Summer” directly on Graham’s “She Moved Through the Fair” arrangement, using DADGAD. Page played “White Summer” at nearly every Led Zeppelin concert. “Kashmir” draws on the same DADGAD modal thinking. The acoustic dimension of Led Zeppelin — “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp,” “Gallows Pole,” the whole acoustic side of the band’s identity — is partly Graham’s legacy mediated through Page’s absorption of British folk guitar.

John Renbourn — who appears in our next article (#119) — worked directly alongside Graham and developed his own synthesis of folk, medieval music, and jazz partly in dialogue with Graham’s approach. Renbourn’s assessment of DADGAD — “if Davy had done little else, his immortality would still be assured” — is the most precise tribute to Graham’s technical contribution.

Martin Carthy (Series 2 #121) and John Martyn (Series 2 #120) both draw on Graham’s synthesis of folk and jazz guitar vocabulary. Carthy absorbed the DADGAD tuning and the multi-genre approach. Martyn took the jazz-folk synthesis in a more electric, ambient direction.

Paul Simon recorded “Anji” on Sounds of Silence (1966) — crediting Graham as composer — which introduced Graham’s piece to an audience of millions worldwide. Simon’s acoustic guitar style in the early Simon and Garfunkel period shows clear Graham influence in its fingerpicking sophistication.

Richard Thompson — one of the most complete guitarists of the rock era, whose playing spans folk, rock, and jazz in exactly the Graham tradition — is explicitly influenced by Graham’s synthesis. The British folk-rock movement that Thompson helped create through Fairport Convention is partly an electrified extension of what Graham was doing acoustically in the folk clubs.

The specific legacy of DADGAD tuning is so widespread that it has effectively become a standard alternative to standard tuning in acoustic guitar playing. Celtic music uses it systematically. World music guitarists use it. Fingerstyle arrangers use it. Singer-songwriters use it for specific modal effects. Jimmy Page used it for one of the most famous pieces in the Led Zeppelin catalog. Every one of those uses traces back to a hotel room in Morocco in the mid-1960s, and a guitarist trying to translate what the oud players were doing.

Internal Links:

• Jimmy Page, whose White Summer and Kashmir draw directly on Graham’s DADGAD innovations (Series 1)
• John Renbourn, Graham’s closest peer and collaborator in the British folk-baroque tradition at #119
• John Martyn, who took Graham’s folk-jazz synthesis into electric territory at #120
• Big Bill Broonzy, one of Graham’s foundational blues influences at Series 2 #103

Frequently Asked Questions: Davy Graham Guitars & Gear

What guitar did Davy Graham play?
Davy Graham’s primary guitars were a natural-top Gibson J-45 or J-50 (the two are closely related, differing mainly in finish) during his peak 1960s period. He also used Martin acoustics including a D-1 and a custom Martin OM model associated with his name. In his later career he used Fylde Orsino and Falstaff guitars built by the small British luthier Fylde Guitars. After a burglary took most of his instruments, he played for a period with a cheap Hohner nylon-string until a musician gifted him his Martin. He had classical guitar training from age twelve and used nylon-string instruments alongside steel-string throughout his career.

Did Davy Graham invent DADGAD tuning?
Graham is generally credited with popularizing DADGAD tuning and introducing it to British guitarists, though both he and Martin Carthy attributed it to each other at different times. He developed the tuning around 1964 while traveling in Morocco, specifically to translate the sound of oud music — with its characteristic open-string drones and modal scales — onto the guitar. DADGAD (D-A-D-G-A-D) produces an open Dsus4 chord, tonally ambiguous between major and minor, with open strings that drone sympathetically beneath fretted melody notes. It is now one of the most commonly used alternate tunings in folk, Celtic, and world music guitar playing.

How did Davy Graham influence Jimmy Page?
Jimmy Page based his solo piece “White Summer” directly on Graham’s 1963 arrangement of “She Moved Through the Fair,” using DADGAD tuning. Page recorded “White Summer” with the Yardbirds in 1967 and performed it at virtually every Led Zeppelin concert. “Over the Hills and Far Away” was partly developed from “White Summer.” The modal, droning quality of “Kashmir” — Led Zeppelin’s most celebrated piece — draws on the DADGAD-enabled modal thinking that Graham introduced to British guitarists. Page has acknowledged Graham’s influence on his acoustic and DADGAD-based work.

What is “Anji” and why is it important?
“Anji” is a fingerstyle acoustic guitar piece composed by Davy Graham, first recorded in 1961 and released on his 1962 EP 3/4 AD. It became, for a period in the 1960s, the prerequisite of joining many British folk clubs — if you could play “Anji,” you were taken seriously as a guitarist. Bert Jansch recorded it; Paul Simon recorded it and included it on Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence (1966), crediting Graham as composer. The piece is significant as an early demonstration of sophisticated fingerstyle technique applied to an original composition rather than a traditional song, establishing acoustic guitar as a vehicle for serious instrumental music outside the classical tradition.

What is Folk, Blues and Beyond and why is it important?
Folk, Blues and Beyond (Decca, 1965) is Davy Graham’s second studio album and is widely considered his most groundbreaking work. It moves across Lead Belly, Reverend Gary Davis, Big Bill Broonzy, Pakistani thumri, and Indian raga within a single album — a synthesis of American blues, British folk, and South Asian music that had no precedent in British acoustic guitar recording. Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, John Renbourn, Martin Carthy, John Martyn, Richard Thompson, Paul Simon, and Jimmy Page all cite it as formative. It is considered one of the defining records of the 20th century in acoustic guitar music.

Why is Davy Graham not more widely known?
Graham’s relative obscurity — compared to the guitarists he influenced — reflects several factors: his heroin addiction removed him from the music scene for much of the 1970s; he was never commercially oriented and resisted the promotional machinery of the music industry; and his music was genuinely ahead of its time in the early 1960s, without a commercial context that could have brought it to a wider audience. His influence traveled primarily through other musicians rather than directly to audiences, which is why guitarists of his generation unanimously cite him while casual listeners may not know his name. John Renbourn’s statement — “if Davy had done little else except become the inventor of DADGAD, his immortality would still be assured” — captures the paradox of a musician whose technical and conceptual contributions were enormous but whose public recognition remained limited.

What amplifier did Davy Graham use?
Graham primarily performed acoustic guitar without amplification — his primary venues were folk clubs and concert halls where the guitar’s natural acoustic projection was sufficient. When amplification was required for larger settings, he used acoustic pickups (his later Martin had a Fishman pickup fitted for occasional live use). He was not an electric guitarist or an amplifier user in any significant sense; his entire tonal identity was based on the acoustic guitar’s unamplified natural sound in an intimate performance space.