This may have been my introduction to folk music. I was a bit late, considering it’s a nineteenth-century song, though it goes back even further than that in its inspiration.
Probably all the way to The Willow Song that appeared in an Elizabethan book of lute music in 1583, and was sung by Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello. It’s produced, I now discover, by the not-entirely-traditional Mike Batt, who had already tasted chart success, if not personal stardom, with The Wombles.
Like all traditional folk songs, All Around My Hat has evolved over the centuries, with dozens of different “broadside” versions from the Nineteenth century alone, in which the genders, occupations and outcomes all vary.
One of the earliest versions, from the 1820s, is about a Cockney costermonger vowing to be true to his fiancee, who has been sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Australia for theft, by wearing green willow sprigs in his hat band for “a twelve-month and a day.”
The roles are reversed in lily-white hands of Maddy Prior (all ladies’ hands are lily-white in folk songs, just as their hair is fair and their lips are ruby-red) and she is the one wearing the green willow in her hatband for 366 days (or 367 if it’s a Leap Year) fending off feckless suitors bearing diamond rings until his return from faraway lands with scurvy and other unmentionable diseases.
Steeleye Span had already been through major changes by the time they had this hit, which followed the success of their Christmas carol, Gaudete, in 1973. The band formed in 1969 after Ashley Hutchings left Fairport Convention, the group he had co-founded two years earlier, to create a new group with two female singers, Maddy Prior and Gay Woods; the group completed by Tim Hart and Gay’s husband Terry.
The Woodses left after one album and were replaced by veteran folkie Martin Carthy and fiddler Peter Knight but by the time they recorded All Around My Hat, Hutchings and Carthy and had moved on and the band began developing more of a folk-rock fusion sound with two new musicians, guitarist Bob Johnson and Rick Kemp on bass, later adding drummer Nigel Pegrum.
Despite adopting that fairly conventional rock line-up, their only other hit was the a cappella Christmas carol Gaudete, two years before this song reached no.5 in November 1975. Steeleye Span, with Maddy Prior still at the helm, spent the Nineties touring on a double-bill with Status Quo, who – to my great surprise – covered this song together, and were still going strong at the start of lockdown, appearing at Glastonbury in 2019.