Here is my 52nd weekly post – completing the first year of the blog =coinciding with the week in which I reach the grand old age of 52. It’s almost as if I’d planned it all (I didn’t).
I learned this song from Roy Palmer’s Everyman’s Book of English Country Songs. It was recorded in 1976 by Mike Yates, from Fred Cottenham, at Chiddingstone in Kent. Mike mistakenly gave the singer’s name as “Fred Cottingham”, and this was repeated both in Roy’s book, and when the recording was included on the Veteran Tapes cassette The Horkey Load Volume 1. However Fred’s surname was definitely Cottenham: you can read about his life, and his singing father “Needle” Cottenham, in an article by George Frampton for Musical Traditions – Fred Cottenham: The ‘Crockery Ware’ Man.
The “crockery ware” referred to in this song, incidentally, is the chamber pot, aka the gazunder.
The Crockery Ware – ballad from the Bodleian collection
The Crockery Ware
A Folk Song a Week 