Molly Drake
I was turned on to Nick Drake by my friend Michael Welch in 1986 when Rykodisc put out a reissue of the Fruit Tree compilation on vinyl. The first song I remember hearing was “Three Hours” from the “Five Leaves Left” album, and then I just listened to everything else.
Such a unique sound with his nylon string tuned to some open C tuning, or maybe F, and his beautiful mysterious voice-it’s like he’s using falsetto in lower registers-and in his later tunes, like “Black Eyed Dog” he sounds like he’s intentionally pushing sharp to create the strange slightly spooky emotion of Robert Johnson and other early blues singers.
And even though it was like a type of folk music-at the time I thought maybe he was drawing on some weird early english melodies I had never heard before-it just seemed that it was a sound he mainly invented.
But then out of the blue I was listening to NPR one night and they were playing and discussing songs by Molly Drake. Nick Drakes’ mom! I’ve tried to find the radio piece in the NPR archive to link to here, but I can’t find it-but, at the time, it prompted me to immediately try to find a vinyl version of a record of her collected recordings-there are moments where you can for sure hear that her songwriting had influenced Nick!
The record was put out in 2013 on Squirrel Thing Records and I think it was a limited run on vinyl. I think maybe Hannah found it on Discogs or ebay or something as a gift to me- It was a bit pricey, but now you can find all the tracks online, on youtube or any of the streaming services .
The songs were recorded in the 1950’s at home on a Ferrograph Recorder by her husband Rodney Drake and they have a haunting sound similar to Nick Drakes’ tunes. Very cool to actually hear something you can point to and say, “hey I can hear that Nick took something from this”, and the fact that it was his mom makes it pretty fun to listen to.
Nick made lists of music and records he loved and carefully wrote ratings and notes about his record collection and in a book I have is a picture that includes a note he wrote about his moms music and he rated her highly-”Very Good Indeed” :)
I found a nice article about her music here:
Far Out Magazine on Molly Drake
And hear are her songs on youtube: