‘Poverty Knock’ is nothing short of a classic. I first heard it while painstakingly trying to pick it out on a piano, struggling to read the music in Roy Palmer’s book of the same title (not that Palmer scored it badly – my sight-reading is woeful). It’s one of those “folk songs” that makes the […]
The second song on the digi-single I released this month is a weird little thing from Hartlepool. Who Hung The Monkey deals with the tale of the monkey (named Pug in this song) that washed up on a Hartlepool beach during the Napoleonic Wars and was hanged by the locals for being a French spy. An easy mistake […]
Yep, you read that title correctly. I remember sitting in the library at Cecil Sharp House with a friend of mine, back when I started researching Midlands folk songs, when he held up a book opened at this song and whispered, “This can’t mean what we think it means, can it?” Oh, It Was My […]