"You'd hardly credit it, but I still get folks jes' comin' up to me and singing - or reciting - D'ye ken John Peel, each apparently believing that they have been the first to spot the link between my nom de guerre and the song about the old huntsman." (Radio Times, 27th June 1998)
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[]
D'ye Ken John Peel - Arr.P.M.Adamson
After several years of work in US commercial pop radio, using the name John Ravencroft, Peel returned to the UK and found a job on Radio London, starting in March 1967. It was on "Big L" that he first adopted the name "John Peel". The name was suggested by a Radio London secretary, because the song "D'ye ken John Peel" was very well-known in Britain (children learned it in school music lessons), and the DJ kept it until his death, despite loathing the song. The only version of it he ever featured on his programmes was an old 78 rpm recording of the tune, played in early 1900s ragtime banjo style (possibly by Olly Oakley), which he occasionally used as a show introduction in the mid-1970s. However, the song was so well-known as to spawn numerous parodies and adaptations, and in the late 70's, punk band Nasty Media modified the lyrics of the song, to sing about John Peel, the DJ, rather than the huntsman.
The song was also used in an episode of I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again (date unknown) as a parody of the DJ, in a version 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 shows from the series in his record collection.[1]
An article on Peel published in the Guardian in 1968, which portrayed the DJ at the time of his early Night Ride programmes, was also entitled "D'ye ken John Peel?"[2].