British folk musicians of the early 60s were heavily influenced by American revival artists like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and later Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. This led indirectly to the subgenre of British progressive folk music, pioneered by performers like the Scottish Incredible String Band from 1967 and the distinctive folk baroque guitar style of players like Davy Graham, Martin Carthy, John Renbourn and Bert Jansch.B. Sweers, Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 40–53. Many progressive folk performers continued to retain a traditional element in their music, including Jansch and Renbourn, who with Jacqui McShee, Danny Thompson, and Terry Cox, formed Pentangle in 1967. Others totally abandoned the traditional element and in this area particularly important were the Scottish artists Donovan (who was most influenced by emerging progressive folk musicians in America like Bob Dylan) and the Incredible String Band, who from 1967 incorporated a range of influences including medieval and eastern music into their compositions. Some of this, particularly the Incredible String Band, has been seen as developing into the further subgenre of psych or psychedelic folk and had a considerable impact on progressive and psychedelic rock.J. DeRogatis, Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock (Milwaukie MI, Hal Leonard, 2003), p. 120. There was a brief flowering of British progressive folk in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with groups like the Third Ear Band and Quintessence following the eastern Indian musical and more abstract work by group such as Comus, Dando Shaft, Trees, Spirogyra, Forest, and Jan Dukes De Grey, but commercial success was elusive for these bands and most had broken off, or moved in very different directions, by about 1973. From about 1967 there were also a number British bands, like Fairport Convention, who were directly influenced by American acts like the Byrds to play folk music on electric instruments.
