Nottamun Town: A Song History
"Nottamun Town" is a nonsense song in which the singer arrives at a town whose people seem mad and whose sights contradict themselves.[1] The English collector Cecil Sharp, working from the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky, in 1917, took it down from two students there, Una Ritchie and her second cousin Sabrina Ritchie.[2] Sharp printed two texts with their tunes in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians; the Traditional Ballad Index also records versions from southern England, the Appalachians and the American South, and Maritime Canada, among them one printed as "Nottingham Fair."[1] The Index's earliest dated example is a New York broadside of the early 1860s under another title, and the sources consulted here do not settle where the song began.[1]
Nicolò Nelli, The World Turned Upside Down (Il Mondo alla Riversa), engraving, 1552–79. A topsy-turvy print, shown for the song's town where nothing makes sense; it has no connection to the song.
Una's younger sister, Jean Ritchie, traced the song to Sabrina's father, Uncle Jason Ritchie.[2] Jean recorded it in 1954 on the Elektra album Kentucky Mountain Songs, writing that her family could explain neither its source nor its sense; in 1965 she suggested it was probably "a remnant of an early mummers' play."[3] Shirley Collins learned it from Ritchie and recorded it with Davy Graham in 1964; Bert Jansch followed in 1966 and Fairport Convention, with Sandy Denny singing, in 1969, and Bob Dylan borrowed its melody for "Masters of War."[3] Deborah Hamouris gives it two settings, one in DAC and one in GDF tuning, in Indian Summer, an 86-page book of original and traditional music for standard mountain dulcimer, where the title appears as "Nottmamun Town."[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Nottamun Town (Nottingham Fair)".
- Library of Congress, Folklife Today: "Jean Ritchie, 1922-2015".
- Mainly Norfolk: "Nottamun Town".
- Deborah Hamouris: "Indian Summer".
- Image: Nicolò Nelli, The World Turned Upside Down (Il Mondo alla Riversa), engraving, 1552–79. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.