Blackwaterside

Down by Blackwaterside is a traditional song in which a young woman is seduced on a false promise of marriage, then mocked and sent home to her father, left to blame herself for believing him. A. L. Lloyd noted that its verses drifted in from several other songs. Its common modern form traces to a BBC recording of the Irish Traveller Mary Doran made in 1952. Isla Cameron recorded it, Anne Briggs learned it through Lloyd and Cameron and taught it to Jansch, and he worked out his guitar part while accompanying her.

He recorded it alone for Jack Orion in 1966. NPR's Tom Cole describes him slurring and swallowing words over percussive fingerpicking that stands almost level with the voice, and Andrew Shields called it the definitive recording of the song.

Black Mountain Side

Led Zeppelin's instrumental Black Mountain Side, released in January 1969, was adapted from Jansch's arrangement without credit, with Page on a borrowed Gibson J-200 in DADGAD tuning and Viram Jasani on tabla. Al Stewart says he taught Page the piece during a break in a session. Transatlantic took legal advice but did nothing, since the melody was traditional and the recording could not be shown to be Jansch's copyright. Jansch's own verdict was that Page had ripped him off.

Live and covers

It is the song setlist.fm logs most often in his sets. He played it with Altan on Later... with Jools Holland in 1996, at his BBC Four Sessions concert in 2003 and for NPR's World Cafe in 2011, and a version appears on Live at the 12 Bar. Briggs, Sandy Denny, Jean Redpath, Altan, Oysterband and Cara Dillon are among the many others who have recorded the song, and Ralph McTell's A Kiss in the Rain tells of Jansch learning it from Briggs. The upload in the hypersongs web is a live solo performance filmed in 1975 for the Danish television film A Man and His Songs.