Day 3: Fakenham Fair

The liner notes when Peter recorded this (on Mainly Norfolk) says that he learned it from Pete Bullen of Norwich who learned it from his grandfather (as with Yarmouth Town).

When I was collecting suggestions for this project, Ed Wynn said that he felt one of Peter's best legacies is the range of trad folk songs he rescued from obscurity and Ed had the impression that he spent a long time ploughing through archives and picking out survivors.

Having said that, there are a fair few "conspiracies" about this song. The first is that it was only ever collected from Peter Bullen and the language is "too modern" for songs of that time, leading some to think that Bullen's grandfather actually wrote it.

The deeper conspiracy is nobody has found any further information on Peter Bullen, nobody can find a record of this song before the 1960s and (most damningly) "Bullen" sounds suspiciously close to "Bellamy". Some people have since posited that Bellamy wrote this song himself but "gifted" it to the tradition by inventing the story of collecting it in Norfolk.

Personally, I don't think he'd have done that - he cared so much about preserving and spotlighting Norfolk traditional song and singers that making up this story and not telling anyone the truth over the next 20 years seems unlikely.

My first introduction to this would have been Bellowhead's version on their second album Matachin. That version has very much infected my brain so I had to spend a lot of time trying to sing this differently from how Jon does!