Yes Maggie, I suffer from the same affliction:

"I don't have a dog in this fight, I just enjoy looking for obscure or hard-to-find documents and books. You can retire from the library but all of those habits go with you when you leave the building."

Listening to the song, the singer doesn't appear to have a strong American accent to me, although the word "master" is pronounced "masster" and not "marster". Some UK accents use that pronunciation though, and the words "tavern" and "village" give a UK influence to the song.

The original post on this thread mentions The Strawbs who were a UK band - I have had one of their albums since the mid-'70's and then upgraded to CD about 20 years ago - and a Guest 20 Aug 21 - 08:48 AM mentioned Strawberry Alarm Clock who were a US band. I remember their song Incense and Peppermints but the names of the rest of their songs are not familiar to me. The two bands have different musical styles, I'm thinking, and I admit I only have one album of The Strawbs but I see very little similarity to the mystery song.

It would probably help to narrow down the likely year or years that the song was originally heard instead of just saying that it was sometime in the '70's.