Some songwriters leave behind a legacy; others, a flash of lightning. For every ten artists you’ve heard of, there are ten thousand who created art, shared it with the world, then silently disappeared into obscurity. Some did so on purpose. Others did not.
Videos by American Songwriter
During the tidal wave of acoustic guitar-wielding folkies of the 1960s, countless musicians contributed to the rapidly ballooning folk catalogue under spotlights far dimmer than those of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell.
Under the pressure to keep up with their commercially viable peers, many failed to break through to stardom. In these four musicians’ cases, they explicitly avoided doing so.
Jackson C. Frank
Tragedy marred Jackson C. Frank’s life. He began playing guitar as a child in the hospital after a school furnace explosion killed most of his classmates and injured him. After moving to London with funds from a robust insurance, Frank gently dominated the U.K. folk scene as an unassuming but brilliant expat. He played a Martin guitar, which was still novel at the time. His contemporaries included soon-to-be stars like Paul Simon, John Renbourn, and Al Stewart.
“[Frank] was the opposite of the loud American, as it were,” Renbourn told The Guardian. “He wasn’t promoting himself or blagging at all. I was knocked out whenever I heard him play.” Frank released one eponymous album with the help of Simon. Despite its poor sales, tracks from the record quickly became folk standards that artists would cover for decades to come, including “Blues Run the Game” and “Milk and Honey.”
As his peers skyrocketed to fame around him, Frank returned to the States and settled down with a wife. They had a son who tragically died of cystic fibrosis. After he and his wife divorced, Frank ended up homeless in upstate New York. A group of rabble-rousing kids blinded Frank in one eye after they shot an air rifle at him for fun. Frank died in 1999, leaving behind a singularly incredible folk record that, when considering the heartbreak that persisted throughout his life, has become all the more poignant with time.
Margo Guyran
A classically trained pianist-turned-pop writer, Margo Guyran spent most of the 1960s chasing down producers, publishers, and, in a roundabout way, fame. She released one album with Bell Records, titled ‘Take a Picture.’ The LP included cuts like “Think of Rain” (the revolutionary, avant-garde pop flavor of The Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ inspired this track) and “Sunday Morning,” which more commercial artists like Glen Campbell and Bobbie Gentry later covered.
Guyran’s first and last record faltered due to her complicated relationship with the music industry. On a 2010 episode of the “Iain Lee’s Best Bits” podcast, Guyran recalled, “Performing required an agent, and a manager and a lawyer and a booking person. You got owned by these people. They told you where to go, how to look, how to dress, what to say, and I didn’t want that. I guess I had about enough daddy when I was five, and I just didn’t like being told what to do.”
Starting in the early 2000s, record companies began distributing collections of demos Guyran had recorded four decades earlier. A 2014 cassette tape titled ‘27 Demos’ included politically driven songs like “The Hum,” which Guyran wrote after and about Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Modern artists like Bedouine later covered the scathing song, adding minor changes to contextualize the track within the context of the Trump administration.
Fred Neil
Amidst the heyday of the Greenwich Village folk scene, there was Fred Neil. With his baritone voice, 12-string guitar, and humble-to-a-fault attitude, Neil quickly became a neighborhood legend. Quick to support his fellow musician, Neil paved the way for future artists like Bob Dylan, David Crosby, and Harry Nilsson who were still struggling to find their footing in the volatile music industry. Ironically, Neil would turn his back on that very industry within a decade of rising to prominence within his regional scene.
Neil’s most iconic tracks include “Everybody’s Talkin’” and “Other Side of Life,” which artists like The Lovin’ Spoonful, Linda Ronstadt, and Tim Buckley eagerly covered. Jefferson Airplane also credited Neil as a significant creative inspiration, and the band wrote their lesser-known hit “The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil” to the reclusive songwriter. According to Woodstock promoter Michael Lang, Neil was the first person Lang and his colleagues asked to perform at the legendary festival. Neil said no.
Fame was never Neil’s end goal. While his contemporaries and disciples continued to shoot for the stars, Neil retreated to Florida. He spent the rest of his life devoting his time and energy to the Dolphin Research Project, a non-profit dedicated to protecting the mammalian species worldwide. He died of cancer in 2001, leaving behind an extensive—albeit unseen—musical legacy.
(Photo by Andrew Putler/Redferns)
