Martin Carthy Guitars & Gear: The Complete Guide to the Father of British Folk Guitar

In the winter of 1962 to 1963, a young American with a harmonica rack around his neck turned up in London’s folk clubs, guitar in hand, soaking up everything the British folk revival had to offer. His name was Bob Dylan. He stayed in Martin Carthy’s house. He learned songs from Martin Carthy. The specific song arrangement he absorbed most directly — a version of “Scarborough Fair” that Carthy had developed from an Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger songbook — became the basis of “Girl from the North Country” and, separately, informed “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Two years later, Paul Simon turned up in the same London folk club circuit. Carthy taught him “Scarborough Fair” in 1964 or 1965. Simon and Art Garfunkel recorded it for The Graduate soundtrack in 1966 and it became one of the most celebrated folk songs in popular music history.

Martin Carthy received no credit for either borrowing. He carried a frustration about the Simon situation for decades before listening more carefully and concluding that “he actually wrote a song in tribute to ‘Scarborough Fair,’ he didn’t steal my arrangement, and if I had bothered to listen to his version for 30 seconds, I would have realised. Paul is an entirely honourable person.” The Dylan situation has been acknowledged in a different way — Dylan has always credited Carthy as an influence when discussing “Girl from the North Country.” The point of the story, for the purposes of a gear guide, is this: the specific guitar arrangement of “Scarborough Fair” that both Dylan and Simon absorbed from Carthy — the one that required the specific tuning, the specific percussive attack, the specific way of building a melodic line out of the CGCDGA open tuning — came from a Martin 000-18 acoustic guitar in Carthy’s hands. The guitar that changed how two of the most important singer-songwriters of the twentieth century understood what folk music was.

Martin Carthy MBE was born on May 21, 1941, in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, and grew up in Hampstead, north London. He trained as an actor before music took over, worked as a prompter and stage manager in theater, and then discovered the folk club circuit in earnest in the late 1950s. His first major folk music influences were Big Bill Broonzy — the same Chicago acoustic blues guitarist who influenced Davy Graham and the entire British folk-blues synthesis — and Elizabeth Cotten, whose syncopated “Freight Train” finger-picking style was a revelation to the young Carthy. He became resident at the Troubadour folk club in Earls Court in the early 1960s, joined Redd Sullivan’s Thameside Four in 1961, and by 1965 — when his debut solo album was released on Fontana Records — he had developed the guitar style and the CGCDGA tuning system that would define his entire career. He received an MBE for services to folk music. He is, by common acknowledgment, the most important single figure in the British folk guitar revival.

Background: From Troubadour Folk Club to the Founding Figure of English Folk Guitar

The folk revival that Carthy emerged from in the early 1960s was simultaneously the most exciting and the most politically charged musical movement in Britain. Ewan MacColl and A.L. “Bert” Lloyd — the elder statesmen of the revival — had spent decades collecting, documenting, and promoting British and Irish traditional song, and their commitment to the material was as much political as aesthetic: folk music as the authentic voice of the working class, as a counter to the commercialism of popular music, as a specifically British cultural tradition worth defending against American influence. Carthy absorbed this seriousness about the material while being more musically adventurous than many of his contemporaries. Where some in the revival were suspicious of American blues influences or of sophisticated guitar arrangement, Carthy was synthesizing Big Bill Broonzy’s fingerpicking with Elizabeth Cotten’s syncopated style and applying the result to English and Scottish traditional ballads.

The specific challenge he faced was one that no guitarist in Britain had fully solved before him: how do you accompany a melody that doesn’t follow standard Western tonal structures — that uses modal scales outside the major/minor system, that has rhythms that don’t conform to regular bar lengths, that has a specific pulse derived from the dance and oral traditions of hundreds of years — on an instrument (the guitar) that was designed for Western functional harmony? The piano, when folk accompanists tried it, imposed its own harmonic vocabulary too forcefully. The guitar in standard tuning presented similar problems: the standard chord shapes of Western harmony didn’t fit the modal character of the tunes. Carthy’s answer was to redesign the guitar itself — to retune it from standard EADGBE to CGCDGA, creating an instrument that functioned differently from the standard guitar and that could accommodate the modal harmonics of English traditional music without imposing Western major/minor tonality on top of it.

His partnership with fiddler Dave Swarbrick — who appears on his debut album (without sleeve credit, a notorious oversight) and who remained a creative collaborator for decades — was one of the most important instrumental partnerships in British folk music. The guitar-and-fiddle combination, with Carthy’s percussive, modal guitar providing a rhythmic and harmonic foundation for Swarbrick’s melodically ornate fiddle lines, created a specifically British sound: not Irish traditional (a related but distinct tradition), not American old-time, but unmistakably English in its specific combination of melody, rhythm, and modal harmonic language.

He was a founding member of Steeleye Span — the electric folk-rock group that electrified traditional British song in the early 1970s, creating the British equivalent of what Fairport Convention was simultaneously building. He sang with the Watersons (the a cappella harmony group led by his wife Norma Waterson) from 1972 onward. He was part of Brass Monkey, mixing folk guitar and mandolin with brass instruments. He participated in the multi-cultural folk project The Imagined Village. His family — wife Norma Waterson, daughter Eliza Carthy — constitute one of the most distinguished musical families in British folk history. He has, across six decades, been present at every significant moment of the British folk revival’s development, not as an observer but as an active shaping force.

The Rig: Martin Carthy’s Guitars and Instruments

Guitars

Martin 000-18 (Primary Guitar, Career Signature Instrument): Martin Carthy’s instrument — “his trusty old Martin Guitar,” as his standard biography has it — is a Martin 000-18. The Martin 000 is an orchestra model body: smaller than a dreadnought, with a narrower waist and less bass projection, but with exceptional clarity and balance across the frequency range that makes it specifically suited to fingerstyle work where individual note separation matters more than maximum volume. The 000-18 designation specifies the -18 wood configuration: mahogany back and sides (rather than the rosewood of the -28), spruce top, and the specific warmth and midrange clarity that mahogany provides versus rosewood’s brighter, more projecting character.

The 000 body size is smaller than the dreadnought and has a 12-fret neck join rather than the 14-fret join of modern dreadnoughts — the bridge sits further back on the body relative to a 14-fret instrument, giving the top a different resonance characteristic and the overall instrument a more balanced, less bass-heavy response. For Carthy’s approach — where the melody line on the higher strings must be audible above the percussive bass attack he generates with his thumb in CGCDGA tuning — the 000-18’s natural balance between bass and treble response is not incidental but essential. A dreadnought’s bass-heavy response would obscure the melody; the 000’s natural tonal balance keeps the melody forward.

Martin produces a signature model — the Martin 000-18 Martin Carthy — that documents his specific preferences in a production instrument. The relationship between Martin Carthy and C.F. Martin & Co. is one of the more appropriate brand associations in acoustic guitar history: the most important British folk guitarist, playing the American company’s smallest and most balanced standard model, for six decades without deviation.

Mandolin (Brass Monkey and Various Contexts): Alongside the guitar, Carthy plays mandolin — documented in his Brass Monkey work alongside John Kirkpatrick’s accordion and brass instruments. The mandolin’s specific tonal character and its relationship to the fiddle tradition (both are tuned in fifths, both carry the melodic ornament vocabulary of British folk music) made it a natural second instrument for a guitarist whose primary material is the traditional British and Irish repertoire. His mandolin work is less documented than his guitar work but represents a significant additional dimension of his instrumental range.

Various Acoustic Guitars (Performance and Recording): While the Martin 000-18 is his primary and signature instrument, Carthy has used other acoustic guitars in recording and performance contexts. The specific nature of his CGCDGA tuning — which involves dropping the low E string down two full steps to C — creates significant additional tension change on the instrument and means that a guitar maintained permanently in this tuning is set up specifically for that purpose rather than for standard EADGBE use. Performers who use radical alternate tunings often maintain multiple instruments so that switching between tunings on stage does not require lengthy retuning between songs.

The CGCDGA Tuning: The Most Important Gear Decision: As with Davy Graham’s DADGAD, Martin Carthy’s CGCDGA tuning is so fundamental to his sound and approach that it must be treated as a core element of his gear rather than as a peripheral technical detail. Understanding the tuning is understanding the instrument he plays.

Standard guitar tuning is EADGBE — from lowest to highest string. Carthy’s CGCDGA drops every string: the low E down two full steps to C, the A stays, the D stays, the G stays, the B drops to A, and the high E drops to D… Actually the tuning is: low string C (down from E), then G (standard A drops to G), C (standard D drops to C), D (standard G stays), G (standard B drops to G), A (standard E drops to A). The result is C-G-C-D-G-A. He described it himself as “like a cello if a cello had two strings added between its first and second strings.” The open chord produced by all strings ringing is harmonically ambiguous — not a clean major or minor chord but a complex suspended chord with both open fifths and a major second interval — which is precisely its value for British traditional music where the modal scales and the harmonically ambiguous character of ancient tunes are fundamental to the material.

The low C bass note — the lowest string tuned all the way down from E to C — gives Carthy’s playing its characteristic low register thunder. When he strikes the bass strings percussively with his thumb, the C string produces a sound lower and more resonant than any string on a standard-tuned guitar. This bass register, combined with the modal open chord of the remaining strings, creates the “heavy percussive attack reminiscent of a country bluesman and the gritty rhythm of a diatonic accordion player” that his instructional materials describe. The accordion comparison is precise: the accordion’s button-bass system produces similar low, sustained bass notes beneath modal chord structures, and the rhythmic drive of a diatonic accordion player — which has much in common with the physical act of pushing bass buttons and treble buttons in alternating rhythmic patterns — is what Carthy replicates with his thumb on the low strings and his fingers on the higher strings.

The practical consequence for anyone wanting to approach Carthy’s style: you need to retune the guitar to CGCDGA (or use a purpose-tuned instrument), which means the standard chord shapes of EADGBE tuning are entirely irrelevant. New shapes must be found — shapes that produce the modal harmonics appropriate to the traditional material, rather than the major and minor chord voicings of Western functional harmony.

Amplification

Acoustic Performance (No Standard Amplification): Martin Carthy is fundamentally an acoustic performer. His primary performance context is the folk club, the concert hall, and the festival stage — environments where he performs acoustically or with minimal acoustic reinforcement rather than through an electric amplification rig. His Martin 000-18’s natural acoustic projection, combined with the percussive attack of his playing style, provides sufficient volume for folk club performances without amplification. When a larger venue requires amplification, he uses a simple acoustic pickup into a PA system — the guitar’s natural character remains the primary tonal identity, and the amplification serves only to increase volume rather than to shape tone.

This absence of amplification and effects is as much a philosophical position as a practical one. The British folk revival’s commitment to acoustic authenticity — the live acoustic performance as a form of cultural preservation, a rejection of commercial production values — is a tradition Carthy has maintained throughout his career. Where John Martyn (Series 2 #120) took the acoustic guitar into electric, effects-drenched territory, Carthy moved in the opposite direction, making the unamplified acoustic guitar more capable rather than extending it electronically.

Playing Style & Tone Philosophy

Martin Carthy’s playing style is the most complete realization of the acoustic guitar as a specifically British folk instrument — an instrument reconfigured at the fundamental level of its tuning and technique to serve the specific demands of English and Scottish traditional music rather than the demands of American blues, jazz, or Western classical music for which the guitar’s standard configuration was developed.

His right-hand technique is the synthesis of two American traditions applied to British material. From Big Bill Broonzy he took the driving, rhythmically forceful bass-string attack — the thumb working the bass strings with authority, creating a rhythmic foundation that functions almost like a percussion instrument. From Elizabeth Cotten he took the syncopated, cross-rhythm fingerpicking — Cotten’s left-handed, upside-down guitar playing produced a specific pattern of bass notes and treble melody that displaced them against each other in ways that standard alternating-bass Travis picking does not, and Carthy absorbed this syncopated cross-rhythm into his own approach.

The specific challenge of accompanying English traditional song — which flows with the words rather than with a regular bar structure, which uses modal scales, which has specific ornamental inflections derived from the oral tradition — required Carthy to develop a right-hand rhythmic approach that was flexible enough to follow the vocal line’s natural pulse while maintaining enough rhythmic momentum to drive the music forward. His playing does not impose a fixed rhythm on the vocal melody; it follows the words. This is, according to music scholar analysis, the fundamental achievement: “His approach to arrangement and accompaniment prioritises melody and words. He allows the words to dictate the pulse of the performance, and rarely plays chords, which do not work with modal tunes.”

The rarity of conventional chord playing is significant. In standard guitar accompaniment, chords provide the harmonic framework within which melody notes function. Carthy avoids conventional chord shapes because they impose Western functional harmony — major, minor, dominant seventh structures — on music whose modal character belongs to a different harmonic tradition. Instead, he constructs accompaniment from individual bass notes and individual melody notes, creating harmony through the interaction of voices rather than through block chord playing. This is the folk baroque approach — related to what Davy Graham and John Renbourn were developing in a different repertoire context — applied to the most traditional British material available.

How to Sound Like Martin Carthy

Guitar: A Martin 000-18 or close equivalent is the authentic starting point — small body, mahogany back and sides, spruce top, with the 12-fret neck join that gives the original 000 its specific tonal balance. The Martin 000-18 Standard is the production equivalent. For alternatives: any quality small-body acoustic with mahogany back and sides (Guild M-240E, Collings 001, Taylor 312) will approximate the tonal character, though the Martin’s specific voice is difficult to replicate entirely.

Tuning: CGCDGA — retune from standard EADGBE as follows: low E down to C (two full steps), A down to G (one full step), D down to C (one full step), G stays as D… The specific sequence: C-G-C-D-G-A from lowest to highest string. Be aware that dropping the low E two full steps significantly reduces string tension and may require a heavier gauge string to maintain playable action — Carthy uses heavier strings than standard to compensate for the reduced tension of the low C tuning.

Amp Settings (When Amplified):

Technique: Begin with the CGCDGA tuning and spend time simply exploring how open strings ring in this tuning — identify the modal chord character of the open strings and understand how it differs from standard tuning’s EADGBE chord shapes. Study Carthy’s arrangement of “Scarborough Fair” as the foundational example of how he builds melody and bass simultaneously in CGCDGA. Focus on right-hand independence — the thumb must operate independently of the fingers, maintaining rhythmic drive on the bass strings while the fingers carry the melodic content. His instructional DVD British Fingerstyle Guitar (with Stefan Grossman) provides the most direct access to his specific technique and approach.

Influence & Legacy

Martin Carthy’s influence divides into three categories that are rarely discussed together but all flow from the same source — the Martin 000-18 in CGCDGA tuning in the early 1960s London folk clubs.

The first category is his direct influence on British folk guitarists: “a guitar style emulated by practically all English folk guitarists since the 1970s,” as one assessment puts it. The percussive, modally tuned, melody-forward approach he developed has become the standard approach for English folk guitar accompaniment. Every guitarist who accompanies English traditional song in the post-Carthy tradition — and that means essentially every English folk guitarist who came after him — learned from his example, directly or through the transmission of his approach through other players.

The second category is his indirect influence through Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” and “Boots of Spanish Leather” both derive from the Carthy arrangement of “Scarborough Fair.” Paul Simon’s “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” is rooted in the same source. Both pieces reached audiences of millions who had never heard of Martin Carthy but whose understanding of what English folk music sounded like was shaped, at one remove, by what he had done with a Martin 000-18 in a London folk club.

The third category is his influence on the broader acoustic guitar tradition as one of the pioneer architects of alternate tuning as a compositional and arranging tool. His CGCDGA system — developed independently of and around the same time as Davy Graham’s DADGAD — demonstrated that the guitar could be fundamentally reconfigured in its harmonic character through tuning alone. The tradition of alternate tuning in acoustic guitar that now encompasses DADGAD, open G, open D, and dozens of other systems owes a debt to the parallel work of Carthy and Graham in London in the early 1960s.

Davy Graham (Series 2 #118) and Carthy were peers who developed alternate tuning systems simultaneously and in the same city but in different musical directions — Graham toward world music and jazz, Carthy toward the British traditional repertoire. John Renbourn (Series 2 #119) absorbed the folk baroque tradition that Carthy and Graham established and took it in a medieval and classical direction. John Martyn (Series 2 #120) took the same folk guitar foundation and extended it into electric, ambient, effects-drenched territory that Carthy himself never pursued. Richard Thompson — who appears in Series 1 as one of the most complete British guitarists of the rock era — explicitly cites Carthy as a primary influence on his understanding of British traditional guitar. The Fairport Convention electric folk project that Thompson was part of is the electrified extension of what Carthy had established acoustically.

He has received every honour the British folk establishment can give: the MBE, the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award, repeated recognition as the most important figure in British traditional music. He continues performing at seventy-plus years old, playing the same Martin 000-18 in the same CGCDGA tuning, singing the same traditional ballads he first arranged in the early 1960s — and making them sound as immediate and as essential as they ever did. The guitar style that all English folk guitarists emulate, the tuning system that Bob Dylan absorbed, the arrangement that Paul Simon recorded for one of the most celebrated songs in folk music history: all of it from one instrument, one tuning, one musician who decided that the guitar could sound like an indigenous British instrument if you gave it the chance.

Internal Links:

• Davy Graham, whose DADGAD tuning development ran parallel to Carthy’s CGCDGA innovation at #118
• John Renbourn, who built on the folk baroque tradition Carthy helped establish at #119
• John Martyn, who took British folk guitar into electric and ambient territory at #120
• Big Bill Broonzy, one of Carthy’s two cited primary guitar influences at Series 2 #103

Frequently Asked Questions: Martin Carthy Guitars & Gear

What guitar does Martin Carthy play?
Martin Carthy plays a Martin 000-18 acoustic guitar — a small-body, mahogany back and sides, spruce top orchestra model that has been his primary and signature instrument throughout his career. Martin produces a signature model, the Martin 000-18 Martin Carthy, based on his specific preferences. The 000-18’s small body size, mahogany warmth, and natural tonal balance between bass and treble response make it specifically suited to his CGCDGA alternate tuning approach, where the low C bass string needs to be audible and powerful but the treble melody strings must remain clear and prominent.

What is CGCDGA tuning and why does Carthy use it?
CGCDGA is Martin Carthy’s signature alternate tuning — from lowest to highest string: C, G, C, D, G, A. Compared to standard EADGBE, every string is lowered: the low E drops two full steps to C, and subsequent strings drop by one step each. Carthy described it as “like a cello if a cello had two strings added between its first and second strings.” He developed the tuning to solve the specific harmonic problem of accompanying English traditional music on guitar: the modal scales and harmonically ambiguous character of traditional British songs require a harmonic context that standard EADGBE chord shapes cannot provide without imposing inappropriate Western major/minor tonality. CGCDGA’s open strings form a modally ambiguous chord that suits the traditional material’s harmonic character.

Did Martin Carthy really teach “Scarborough Fair” to Paul Simon?
Yes — Carthy taught “Scarborough Fair” to Paul Simon in 1964 or 1965 during Simon’s visits to the London folk club circuit. Simon and Garfunkel recorded it for The Graduate soundtrack (1966) and it became one of their signature songs. Carthy believed for decades that Simon had taken his specific arrangement, but later concluded that Simon had written his own tribute to the song rather than stolen Carthy’s arrangement: “He actually wrote a song in tribute to ‘Scarborough Fair,’ he didn’t steal my arrangement, and if I had bothered to listen to his version for 30 seconds, I would have realised. Paul is an entirely honourable person.” Bob Dylan also absorbed Carthy’s arrangement during his 1962-1963 London visit; the result informed “Girl from the North Country” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.”

What were Martin Carthy’s main guitar influences?
Carthy has cited two primary guitar influences: Big Bill Broonzy, the Chicago acoustic blues guitarist whose “driving and percussive” playing style provided the right-hand attack model for Carthy’s bass-string work; and Elizabeth Cotten, whose syncopated “Freight Train” fingerpicking — played upside-down on a left-handed guitar — provided a cross-rhythm fingerstyle model that Carthy absorbed into his own approach. Both are American acoustic guitarists; Carthy’s achievement was applying their techniques to the specifically British traditional repertoire through the CGCDGA tuning system.

What is Steeleye Span and what was Carthy’s role?
Steeleye Span is a British electric folk-rock group formed in 1969 that electrified traditional British folk song in the manner that Fairport Convention was simultaneously developing. Carthy was a founding member, bringing his expertise in traditional song arrangement and his distinctive guitar style to the band’s electric folk context. He was also a member of the Watersons (the a cappella harmony group led by his wife Norma Waterson), Brass Monkey (folk-brass ensemble), Waterson:Carthy (with his wife and daughter Eliza Carthy), and multiple other collaborations across his six-decade career.

Does Martin Carthy use amplification?
Carthy is fundamentally an acoustic performer. His primary performance context is folk clubs, concert halls, and festival stages where he performs acoustically or with minimal acoustic reinforcement. When a larger venue requires amplification, he uses a simple acoustic pickup into a PA system — the guitar’s natural acoustic character remains the primary tonal identity. He does not use an electric amplification rig, effects pedals, or processing in the manner of electric or acoustic-electric guitarists. The acoustic folk club performance tradition, and its commitment to acoustic authenticity, has been Carthy’s performance philosophy throughout his career.

How has Martin Carthy influenced other British guitarists?
Carthy’s guitar style has been emulated by “practically all English folk guitarists since the 1970s” — the CGCDGA tuning system and the percussive, modally-inflected right-hand technique he developed have become the standard approach for English traditional folk guitar accompaniment. More broadly, Richard Thompson (who appears in Series 1) cites Carthy as a primary influence. The Fairport Convention folk-rock tradition — which Thompson was central to — is the electrified extension of what Carthy established acoustically. His influence via Bob Dylan and Paul Simon also indirectly shaped the approach to folk song arrangement of two of the most important singer-songwriters in popular music history.