D'ye Ken John Peel

D'ye ken John Peel is a nineteenth century song praising John Peel, who was an English huntsman and farmer who kept a pack of fox hounds. Peel hunted pine martens and hares in addition to foxes. The words were written by Peel's friend John Woodcock Graves, 1795–1886, in Cumbrian dialect. The words were set to the tune of a traditional Scottish rant, Bonnie Annie, and the most popular arrangement of it in Victorian times was William Metcalfe's version of 1868. He was a conductor and composer and lay clerk of Carlisle Cathedral, and his more musical arrangement of the traditional melody became popular in London and was widely published. However in 1906 the song was included in The National Song Book with a tune closer to Bonnie Annie and that is the most widely known version today- "ken" meaning 'to be aware of' or 'to know' in some dialects of the North of England and Scotland.

Links To Peel
After several years of work in US commercial pop radio, Peel was looking for work and found a job on Radio London presenting a midnight-to-two show, which gradually developed into a programme called The Perfumed Garden (some thought it was named after an erotic book famous at the time – which Peel claimed never to have read). It was on "Big L" that he first adopted the name "John Peel" (the name was suggested by a Radio London secretary after the song), which he kept until his death, despite loathing the song. The song was used as a parody of the DJ, broadcast on I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again which contained the words:
 * D'ye ken John Peel with his voice so grey?
 * He sounds as if he's far far away;
 * He sends you to sleep at the end of the day;
 *  'til you're woken up by Tony Blackburn in the morning.

Peel never appeared on the programme, but did keep two compilation LP's of the programme.