I would very much like to say hello to Jack again, myself. I was a Waggoner for a very short period after the first Cambridge Folk Festival. There was some kind of singing competition at the festival which I won - I think Derek Brimstone came second. Jack Taylor was one of the judges and after the event he invited me to join the Waggoners as concertina player. I was a seventeen year old schoolboy at the time, so this was pretty good going. The group was just him and Lyn at that time. I was in the band for eight or nine months.

This also seems to be a good point to give credit for a song source, namely "Rawtenstall Annual Fair". I did this song on the "Deep Lancashire" vinyl LP. This was released by Topic in 1968, and we were given a one off payment of £3 10s (£3.50p in today's money). We were advised that this was a very good deal as it was very unlikely that anyone would actually buy the record when it came out. Of course, over the next few years everybody in Lancashire bought a copy. When the album was re-released on CD in 1997 they all went out again to replaced the vinyl!

Topic records have just released a lavished boxed set: "Three Score and Ten" and sure enough the Rawtenstall Annual Fair song has turned up yet again. No doubt when they are celebrating six score and twenty (7 score?) it will be once again pressed into service.

I was looking at the original sleeve notes for the vinyl release the other day and I was amused to read that: " Lee Nicholson (sic) learned this song in what folklorists call the oral tradition", and this set me to thinking about how I did actually come about the song.

RAF was one of the high points of a Jack and Lyn Taylor gig, and I felt it was my duty as concertina player in the band to get the words off them as quickly as possible, before leaving to pursue my real interest which was a concertina/bass concertina duo I had going with a guy called Dave Smith. The Waggoners did a gig in Wrexham one weekend and on the train journey down there I got Jack to dictate the words to me as I wrote them down in a notebook (it has to be remembered that a tape recorder* was a luxury item indeed at this time). So it was a cross between the oral tradition and collecting "Cecil Sharp style" (with the train standing in for the bicycle).

The key point here, I think is that it was Jack Taylor who introduced the song into the folk revival (as indeed he introduced a number of other songs into the folk revival via his and MIke Yate's "Ballads and Songs" magazine.) I don't think anybody was doing the song before him, and I lived in Rawtenstall for a number of years at that time, and I can't recall it being in particularly wide circulation there.

* Electro-mechanical device used to record and preserve sound for a short period in the twentieth century