I've always been a Fred Fauntleroy man myself.

Fred developed his chops in colliery bands of the South-East Northumbrian coalfield in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The first evidence we have of him as an actual band-leader is when Fred Fauntleroy and his Gay Serenity Twentieth Century Orchestra play at the wedding of the Wetherstone twins Eustace and Edwin at Coldharbour Castle (as the hall was then still known) on Saturday the 12th of May 1906 - after which his presence is felt right up to his death in the fire that razed Coldharbour Hall on the night of June 21st 1952. Eyewitness accounts have him singing the ballad of Tam Lin self-accompanied on a musical-saw (and playing solos on a Tibetan thigh-bone trumpet) during the Halloween festivities at Coldharbour Hall in 1928. In an age before 'World Music', 'Free-Jazz' and such-like 'Exotica' - even before 'Folk Music' - Fred Fauntleroy was passionately ploughing his own idiosyncratic furrow, unrecorded but for a limited number of disks of his arrangement of Irving Berlin's Monkey-Doodle-Doo (as featured in the Four Marx Brother's hit stage show & debut movie The Cocoanuts) were issued in 1929, although without the twenty-minute 'jungle-music' interlude that made this such a hit with the bright young things who attended the Easter Ball at Coldharbour that same year. As singer Kathleen Carr recalls in her 1953 memoir Monkey-Doodle-Don't:

"We recorded it in the pillar-hall of the New House - Coldharbour Also - not the Hall as has been reported elsewhere. Fred was quite beside himself over the disappearance of his echo-cornet for which the arrangement was specifically scored. Rumour had it that it was taken by Caedmon Cuckfield, but as this was proved false, Fred was forced to make do with the old silver shepherd's crook cornet he used to play in the colliery band - which wasn't too bad in the event, just a little culturally displaced that's all. Not that Fred wasn't proud of his roots, just a little uncomfortable with them - no doubt wary least they spring up again and drag him down with the rest of what Mr Marx laughingly called the proletariat."

For more on Coldharbour Hall (&c.) see Coldharbour : A Brief History as of 1911.