Studying for Higher Latin at school in the early 1960s, I had to memorise the early lines of Ovid’s poem about Arion, the wonderful musician who was saved from drowning by a dolphin, commemorated in the stars as the constellation Delphinus. Via Welsh tradition and Chaucer, Arion enters British folk tradition as ‘Jack Orion’, ‘Glasgerion’ in the Scottish version. Just as in Ovid’s poem, after the opening line ‘Jack Orion was as fine a fiddler, as ever fiddled on a string’, the ballad continues with a list of the magical feats he could perform by the power of his music. The late A.L. Lloyd set the English version to a Scottish tune for his LP ‘First Person’ (Topic, 1966), and a dramatic arrangement of it by Bert Jansch and John Renbourn is the title track of their LP (Transatlantic, 1966), before they went on to form Pentangle the following year.

Also in 1966, I started the Irvine Folk Song Club in Ayrshire, and one of our regulars for the first four years was singer-songwriter Buff Wilson, who lived on Meadowhead Farm between Irvine and Troon, my home town. Several of Buff’s songs featured the Irish farmhand ‘Neilie’, who had lived on the farm for many years, and one night Buff announced that instead of singing, he would recite a folk tale he had learned from Neilie, allegedly the origin of the proverb, ‘Never trust Orangemen or fiddlers’. Buff had never heard ‘Jack Orion’ at the time, so I was amazed when he began, “Jake O’Reilly was the finest fiddler you could find anywhere…”

As regards Sydney Jordan’s ‘Captain O’Ryan’, it’s another coincidence that in my University vacations, again in the mid-60s, I was writing a series about a spaceline called ‘Terran-Astral’. It attracted the attention of the late John W. Campbell and he bought a story from it just before his death (‘Proud Guns to the Sea’, based on the ballad ‘Henry Martin’, Analog, January 1973). Terran-Astral was founded as an airline in the late 20th century, by two Irish brothers called Ryan. The first part of that has come true…