Dando Shaft: Cold Wind

Traditional Tuesday’s feature is a song by an English acoustic band that produced some great music, had a major recording label contract, but failed to move beyond a cult following and achieve a larger audience for their music, 

Dando Shaft was a band of which I became aware through a gift of their first album, “An Evening with Dando Shaft.” From that LP is today’s selection, “Cold Wind.”

From Coventry, England, Dando Shaft made music the old fashioned way . . . acoustically. Eschewing all the trappings of electric instruments and amplification, the band truly was “unplugged.” Following this first release in 1970, Dando Shaft added a female vocalist (Polly Bolton) for their follow-up album that would put them closer to the lineup found with the more successful British traditional bands of Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and Steeleye Span.