Do You Ken John Peel?
John Peel's Grave - Wikimedia Commons
by Kathy Warnes
Like many folk songs Do You Ken John Peel has many different origin stories and as undergone as many transformations in its 300 years of musical history.
Then, I didn’t know why our music teacher Miss Burr chose a song like Do You Ken John Peel? to teach to our long ago elementary school music class. It certainly didn’t send the same message as America the Beautiful. We didn’t sing it at any of our quarterly concerts and we certainly didn’t sing it on the playground where I See London I See France, I See ______’s Under Pants ruled as the song of choice for trips on the Merry Go Round and the Monkey Bars.
Do You Ken John Peel?
But Miss Burr chose Do You Ken John Peel? and played it through on the piano while we dutifully listened so we could catch the rhythm and melody and learn to sing it. It sounded British and colorful and I wanted to make sure the fox got away.I sang John Peel all the way home from school and found out that the fox didn’t escape. I felt sorry for the fox, but I thrilled to the sound of the horn, the red coats – if you use the gay version- and the hounds. Better than the words, I liked the lively melody of the song which made me skip and dance rather than walk home. The first stanza goes like this:
Do you Ken John Peel with his coat so gay? (Or grey. Some versions of the song use the word grey or gray, because John’s coat was made from the local grey Herdwick wool) /Do you ken John Peel at the break of day?/ Do you ken John Peel when he’s far, far away/With his hounds and his horn in the morning?
T’was the sound of his horn brought me from my bed/And the cry of his hounds has he oft times led/For Peel’s view holloa would wake the dead/Or a fox from his lair in the morning.
Dad Said, It’s Really “ Pepsi Cola Hits the Spot”
Finally my Dad told me to stop singing the wrong words to the song. He told me that he remembered the song from the radio and the real name of the song was the Pepsi Cola Song. He said the words went something like:
Pepsi Cola hits the spot/12 full ounces, that’s a lot/Twice as much, and better, too/ Pepsi Cola is the drink for you.
Later, I discovered that in one of Pete Seeger’s early live concert albums he talked about how songs change. After he sang Do You Ken John Peel?, he recalled that he was singing it for some school kids who said that they sang it as: Pepsi Cola hits the spot/Ties your belly in a knot/Tastes like vinegar/Looks like ink/Pepsi Cola is a stinky drink!
John Peel Really Lived in England Centuries Ago
The next music class, I raised my hand and asked Miss Burr about Pepsi Cola vs. John Peel. She said that the tune to the Pepsi Cola Song is from Do You Ken John Peel. She told us the worlds to the Pepsi Cola Song have been and can be changed and the real words and the real tune of the John Peel song have also changed through the centuries. She told us that “ken” is a word that comes from Scotland or the North of England that means know and that Do You Ken John Peel? means “Do You Know John Peel?
Later, I discovered that John Peel lived from 1776 until November 13, 1854. He was born at Park End, near Caldbeck, Cumberland, but his family moved to the Greenrigg farm shortly after his birth. Church records show that he was baptized on September 24, 1777, but sources suggest that he was born in 1776.
When John Peel was in his early 20s, he fell in love with a fellow villager named Mary White and they were married in 1797. Mary brought some of the White family’s property at Ruthwaite, near Ireby, to their marriage as part of her dowry. which provided them a comfortable income which they used to raise their thirteen children.
John Peel farmed, but he also kept a pack of fox hounds and his friends readily admitted that he devoted himself mostly to hunting and drinking. He hunted pine martens and hares as well as foxes and local legend had it that on many occasions he practiced the old Cumberland custom called ‘Chasing the Ace,’ or chasing after the hounds on foot. By the time he died on November 13, 1854, probably from a fall while hunting, he had accumulated large debts that his friends helped him pay off. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Kentigern’s Church in Caldbeck, Cumbria.
John Peel’s Friend John Graves Wrote the Words and Music to John Peel
One version of how the words to John Peel came about has it that Peel’s friend John Woodcock Graves was sitting with one of Peel’s daughters and some fellow hunters in the parlor of the inn at Caldbeck in Cumberland, planning the next day’s hunting. Peel’s daughter asked if anyone knew the words of the traditional Cumberland song called Bonnie Annie.
Nobody did, so Graves wrote the words of Do You Ken John Peel? in Cumbrian dialect. After he sang it to Peel for the first time, Graves joked that people would still be singing the song long after both of them had ‘run to ground,’ which means died in the local dialect.
For several years John Graves tinkered with the words and several different versions of his song were sung locally. George Coward, a Carlisle bookseller, rewrote the lyrics for clarity and Graves approved them for a book of Cumberland songs called Songs and Ballads of Cumberland, published in 1866. The words were set to the tune of a traditional Scottish song called Bonne Annie. Do You Ken John Peel? was sung in countless pubs and London dance halls and in 1906, the song was included in The National Song Book.
Anne Geddes Gilchrist writes in an article in Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1941, that Peel’s mother sang Bonnie Annie to her grandson and that is where Graves got his tune for Do You Ken John Peel?
Another Version of the John Peel Story
According to Theodore Ralph in his book, The American Song Treasury: 100 Favorites, John Peel was really the English novelist John George Whyte-Melville, a former Coldstream Guard captain. He was an expert fox hunter and when he died on the hunting field in 1854, a group of his friends were having drinks after his funeral.
After a couple of drinks, one of his close friends, John Woodcock Graves, scribbled some verses as a tribute to John George Whyte-Melville. He set his words to the tune of the old folk song Bonnie Annie. There is a John Peel Museum of the Border Regiment in Carlisle Castle in Carlisle, Cumbria, England.
The Song, Do You Ken John Peel?, Immigrates to America
Theodore Ralph also says that the original song Bonnie Annie arrived in America shortly after the War of 1812, but it didn’t win much popularity. Decades later, when the Graves version of the song,Do You Ken John Peel? appeared, glee clubs and college students popularized the song.
Folk song enthusiasts kept the song alive well into the Twentieth Century, and in the mid 1940s, the tune of the song gained national recognition from the Pepsi Cola jingle on the radio. After the jingle was discontinued, millions of people remembered and enjoyed the tune and then the original Do You Ken John Peel lyrics were restored.
Do You Ken John Peel is a folk song rich in language, history, and tradition and it is fun to sing.
Now, I know why Miss Burr taught us Do You Ken John Peel?
References
Ralph, Theodore, The American Song Treasury: 100 Favorites. Dover Publications, 1986
Like many folk songs Do You Ken John Peel has many different origin stories and as undergone as many transformations in its 300 years of musical history.
Then, I didn’t know why our music teacher Miss Burr chose a song like Do You Ken John Peel? to teach to our long ago elementary school music class. It certainly didn’t send the same message as America the Beautiful. We didn’t sing it at any of our quarterly concerts and we certainly didn’t sing it on the playground where I See London I See France, I See ______’s Under Pants ruled as the song of choice for trips on the Merry Go Round and the Monkey Bars.
Do You Ken John Peel?
But Miss Burr chose Do You Ken John Peel? and played it through on the piano while we dutifully listened so we could catch the rhythm and melody and learn to sing it. It sounded British and colorful and I wanted to make sure the fox got away.I sang John Peel all the way home from school and found out that the fox didn’t escape. I felt sorry for the fox, but I thrilled to the sound of the horn, the red coats – if you use the gay version- and the hounds. Better than the words, I liked the lively melody of the song which made me skip and dance rather than walk home. The first stanza goes like this:
Do you Ken John Peel with his coat so gay? (Or grey. Some versions of the song use the word grey or gray, because John’s coat was made from the local grey Herdwick wool) /Do you ken John Peel at the break of day?/ Do you ken John Peel when he’s far, far away/With his hounds and his horn in the morning?
T’was the sound of his horn brought me from my bed/And the cry of his hounds has he oft times led/For Peel’s view holloa would wake the dead/Or a fox from his lair in the morning.
Dad Said, It’s Really “ Pepsi Cola Hits the Spot”
Finally my Dad told me to stop singing the wrong words to the song. He told me that he remembered the song from the radio and the real name of the song was the Pepsi Cola Song. He said the words went something like:
Pepsi Cola hits the spot/12 full ounces, that’s a lot/Twice as much, and better, too/ Pepsi Cola is the drink for you.
Later, I discovered that in one of Pete Seeger’s early live concert albums he talked about how songs change. After he sang Do You Ken John Peel?, he recalled that he was singing it for some school kids who said that they sang it as: Pepsi Cola hits the spot/Ties your belly in a knot/Tastes like vinegar/Looks like ink/Pepsi Cola is a stinky drink!
John Peel Really Lived in England Centuries Ago
The next music class, I raised my hand and asked Miss Burr about Pepsi Cola vs. John Peel. She said that the tune to the Pepsi Cola Song is from Do You Ken John Peel. She told us the worlds to the Pepsi Cola Song have been and can be changed and the real words and the real tune of the John Peel song have also changed through the centuries. She told us that “ken” is a word that comes from Scotland or the North of England that means know and that Do You Ken John Peel? means “Do You Know John Peel?
Later, I discovered that John Peel lived from 1776 until November 13, 1854. He was born at Park End, near Caldbeck, Cumberland, but his family moved to the Greenrigg farm shortly after his birth. Church records show that he was baptized on September 24, 1777, but sources suggest that he was born in 1776.
When John Peel was in his early 20s, he fell in love with a fellow villager named Mary White and they were married in 1797. Mary brought some of the White family’s property at Ruthwaite, near Ireby, to their marriage as part of her dowry. which provided them a comfortable income which they used to raise their thirteen children.
John Peel farmed, but he also kept a pack of fox hounds and his friends readily admitted that he devoted himself mostly to hunting and drinking. He hunted pine martens and hares as well as foxes and local legend had it that on many occasions he practiced the old Cumberland custom called ‘Chasing the Ace,’ or chasing after the hounds on foot. By the time he died on November 13, 1854, probably from a fall while hunting, he had accumulated large debts that his friends helped him pay off. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Kentigern’s Church in Caldbeck, Cumbria.
John Peel’s Friend John Graves Wrote the Words and Music to John Peel
One version of how the words to John Peel came about has it that Peel’s friend John Woodcock Graves was sitting with one of Peel’s daughters and some fellow hunters in the parlor of the inn at Caldbeck in Cumberland, planning the next day’s hunting. Peel’s daughter asked if anyone knew the words of the traditional Cumberland song called Bonnie Annie.
Nobody did, so Graves wrote the words of Do You Ken John Peel? in Cumbrian dialect. After he sang it to Peel for the first time, Graves joked that people would still be singing the song long after both of them had ‘run to ground,’ which means died in the local dialect.
For several years John Graves tinkered with the words and several different versions of his song were sung locally. George Coward, a Carlisle bookseller, rewrote the lyrics for clarity and Graves approved them for a book of Cumberland songs called Songs and Ballads of Cumberland, published in 1866. The words were set to the tune of a traditional Scottish song called Bonne Annie. Do You Ken John Peel? was sung in countless pubs and London dance halls and in 1906, the song was included in The National Song Book.
Anne Geddes Gilchrist writes in an article in Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1941, that Peel’s mother sang Bonnie Annie to her grandson and that is where Graves got his tune for Do You Ken John Peel?
Another Version of the John Peel Story
According to Theodore Ralph in his book, The American Song Treasury: 100 Favorites, John Peel was really the English novelist John George Whyte-Melville, a former Coldstream Guard captain. He was an expert fox hunter and when he died on the hunting field in 1854, a group of his friends were having drinks after his funeral.
After a couple of drinks, one of his close friends, John Woodcock Graves, scribbled some verses as a tribute to John George Whyte-Melville. He set his words to the tune of the old folk song Bonnie Annie. There is a John Peel Museum of the Border Regiment in Carlisle Castle in Carlisle, Cumbria, England.
The Song, Do You Ken John Peel?, Immigrates to America
Theodore Ralph also says that the original song Bonnie Annie arrived in America shortly after the War of 1812, but it didn’t win much popularity. Decades later, when the Graves version of the song,Do You Ken John Peel? appeared, glee clubs and college students popularized the song.
Folk song enthusiasts kept the song alive well into the Twentieth Century, and in the mid 1940s, the tune of the song gained national recognition from the Pepsi Cola jingle on the radio. After the jingle was discontinued, millions of people remembered and enjoyed the tune and then the original Do You Ken John Peel lyrics were restored.
Do You Ken John Peel is a folk song rich in language, history, and tradition and it is fun to sing.
Now, I know why Miss Burr taught us Do You Ken John Peel?
References
Ralph, Theodore, The American Song Treasury: 100 Favorites. Dover Publications, 1986
