Scarborough Fair

🎵 Sing along with the full lyrics at LyricFind
(After singing, remember to hit the “back” button to return to Campfire Reunions!)

“Scarborough Fair” is by far the oldest song in most people’s record collections: it’s a traditional Northern English ballad whose roots trace back to “The Elfin Knight,” a song from the 1600s about a suitor demanding impossible tasks — sew me a shirt with no seams, find me an acre of land between the sea and the shore — before love can be won. (One theory holds that the famous refrain “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” is actually a centuries-old mishearing of an older line like “every rose grows merry in time.”) The melody everyone knows today was collected in 1947 by folklorist Ewan MacColl from a retired lead miner in County Durham, England, and it entered the British folk revival from there.

Enter Paul Simon, who spent 1965 knocking around the London folk clubs, where England’s leading young folk singer, Martin Carthy, taught him the song. Simon & Garfunkel recorded it in 1966 as “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” weaving through it a haunting counter-melody — “Canticle” reworked Simon’s earlier anti-war song “The Side of a Hill,” so the gentle medieval love song carries a quiet 1960s protest hidden inside it. Released as a single in 1968 alongside The Graduate, it became a worldwide hit. But the record credited only Simon and Garfunkel, and Carthy — whose arrangement Simon had learned — felt robbed. The grudge lasted more than thirty years, until October 2000, when Simon invited Carthy onstage in London and the two finally sang it together. Carthy later laughed the whole feud off with the truest words in this story: it’s a folk song — it belongs to everybody.