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"The Molecatcher" is a bawdy song well known in the British Isles.
A.L. Lloyd recorded "The Molecatcher" in 1966 for his album The Best of A.L. Lloyd. His notes from the album: "This sly song of the biter bit amused the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams who noted some fine versions of it in Norfolk. Two folklorish parsons, Baring-Gould and Fleetwood Sheppard heard it on bleak Dartmoor and it struck them as “very gross”, so they wrote new words to it that have none of the wit and pungency of the original. Their version may be found in Songs of the West. Our version is from an unpublished set provided by Dr. Vaughan Williams."Ewan MacColl sang "The Molecatcher" in 1972 on Solo Flight and Peter Bellamy learned it from Vaughan Williams' Norfolk Collection via A.L. Lloyd and sang it on his 1983 cassette Fair Annie. The Irish Rovers recorded a cleaned-up version of it on The Life of the Rover (1969). Steve Roud included "The Molecatcher" in 2012 in The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. It is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index as #1052. |