"Nottamun Town"

     “Nottamun Town” is a song of undoubted antiquity, dating at least from the late Middle Ages. With explicitly self-contradictory content, the lyrics challenge listeners’ assumptions in the most fundamental way. The surface it constructs, a shimmering blend of reality and unreality, is mirrored in the song’s elusive transformations over time. The available evidence suggests that the song had all but vanished in England by the eighteenth century, but it had crossed the Atlantic in the century before where it become established in a half dozen Southern states. Several broadside versions were published in New York in the nineteenth century, but the tune was not recorded until Cecil Sharp collected it from Jean Ritchie’s sister Una and cousin Sabrina in 1917. Ritchie later sang the song on many albums and through her renditions and those of other performers who had learned it through her (notably the Fairport Convention) it became reestablished in the U.K. Those influenced included some who deviated from the folk tradition. Dylan used Ritchie’s tune for “Masters of War.” Furthermore, on the holograph of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” just below the line “I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken” Dylan wrote “Nottamun Town,” a clear reference to the line in Ritchie’s song “Ten thousand stood round me but I was alone.” [1] Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter recalled that the song’s underdetermination inspired them to use similarly mysterious imagery. [2]
     Just what does that imagery signify? “Nottamun Town” may easily be characterized as nonsense poetry, but the term is imprecise. What is called nonsense poetry may be of three types. The words may follow the phonological and syntactic rules of a language yet introduce new, more or less suggestive, coinages in a generally intelligible setting. This is the sort well-known from “Jabberwocky” or “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.” Further dislocation from linguistic norms leads to a more radical form of nonsense verse that may approach gibberish such as one sees in magical formulae, Sioux lyric, scat-singing, and speaking in tongues. Some texts, however, including this song, include no neologisms, but rather employ ordinary language to subvert everyday logic. [3]
     The theme of “Nottamun Town” is neither love nor death, but rather the nature of reality itself, or, at any rate, the capacity of language to describe it adequately. The paradoxical content of the song has struck many listeners as puzzling in spite of its resemblance to “O! Susannah,” Stephen Foster’s composed song, and nineteenth century children’s poems such as those by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.
     The sociological bias common to folklorists has led many critics, baffled by the song’s illogic, to suggest the relevance of a variety of historical circumstances. Among the ingenious proposals are the conventions of mummers’ performances, the turmoil of the English Civil War, and outbreaks of plague or ergotism. The very breadth of these suggestions indicates the slender evidence for any. The fact is that even if some social cataclysm accompanied the song’s composition, that event would shed little light on its continuing popularity over centuries in the American colonies among people lacking contact with Great Britain.
     The theory concerning the song’s meaning that I find most useful is, oddly, the least likely of all. Charles Upton, a poet associated with the Beats who became a Sufi, maintains [3] that the song is a coded guide to the spiritual path he regards as sophia perennis. For him each of the specific figures is allegorical, each color is meaningful, and the whole is coherent and complete. This excerpt will be sufficient to direct those who, like me, find Upton’s hermeneutics provocative and ingenious though far from compelling as a whole.


“Nottamun” or “Nottingham” Town is the place of “naughting,” the town where we travel to become “not.” It thus corresponds with the Sufi fana, or self-annihilation. It is the town of the dead—not necessarily the physically dead, but those who are dead in this life—who, in the words of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) have “died before they are made to die.” As Omar Khayyam said, “Dawn is breaking and the caravan/ Starts for the Dawn of Nothing —O make haste!” But it is also, on the negative side, the land of those who are dead to the Spirit, the living dead who make up sense-bound “normal” humanity, now seen as they really are from the vantage point of that other world: hylic (material) man as witnessed from a psychic and potentially pneumatic standpoint.

Each of the seven stations of the spiritual Path is rendered, in “Nottamun Town,” as a polar opposition, whose synthesis opens the door to the next level. . .


     I follow Upton only in part. Though his elaborate gloss on a simple song is admirably clever and almost justifiable, it is far too specific, tailored in detail to fit Upton’s largely preconceived vision. While it is true that the song triggers questions about fundamental assumptions taken for granted in everyday thought (for instance, it implies suspicion of dualism), only the enthusiast will find a detailed and specific spiritual ladder for the aspirant to ascend.
     The song in fact belongs to a considerable tradition of nonsense literature, once directed toward a general audience, but which, in recent times has become associated in particular with children’s poetry. In “Farai un vers de dreit nien,” for example, William IX explicitly declares he will write about “nothing.” He explodes dualities by insisting he is neither happy nor sad, neither stranger nor native.
     One function of such texts is to affirm the fundamentally irrational, ambiguous, or mysterious character of human thought processes, in William’s lyric illustrated by his love dilemma. There is a frisson of delight felt often by the very young in seeing self-contradictions and impossibilities boldly set forth; a similar pleasure, I suspect, underlies the popularity of magicians and, in American culture, special effects in films. Apart from this function as entertainment on the thematic level such celebration of paradox reminds the listener of how fragile the human cause-and-effect understanding of our lives can seem in the light of such consciousness-altering catalysts as art (including religion). Just as the viewer of a suspense film or a Greek tragedy enjoys imagining being in peril while safely enjoying an entertaining narrative (while knowing in the back of the mind that one is at all times in mortal peril) [4], the audience for “Nottamun Town” enjoys playing with epistemological doubt while to some degree recognizing its reality.



1. https://newtonexcelbach.com/2016/06/10/various-routes-to-and-from-nottamun-town/

2. See Blair Jackson's "An Interview About Songwriting and Inspiration," in Goin' Down The Road: A Grateful Dead Traveling Companion, 208-209.

3. I would not consider nonsense statements that seem to ignore natural law, such as one finds in myth, fairy tales, science fiction, “magic realism,” and elsewhere. The worlds imagined in such texts operate by laws, though they may differ from those of everyday lived reality.

3. In Folk Metaphysics. The relevant passage is available as well at www.sophiaperennis.com/discussion-forums/traditionalism-and-folklore/fair-nottamun-town-mystical-and-alchemical-symbolism-in-an-appalachian-folk-song/.

4. Behind this fear is the likelihood that the more or less enlightened viewer of Oedipus Rex, King Lear, or Silence of the Lambs realizes that in the end all is well because, in Pope’s words “Whatever is, is right.”



Nottamun Town as sung by Jean Ritchie

In fair Nottamun town, not a soul would look up,
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,
To show me the way to fair Nottamun town.
I rode a grey horse, a mule roany mare,
Grey mane and grey tail, a green stripe down her back,
Grey mane and grey tail, a green stripe down her back,
There wa'nt a hair on her be-what was coal black.
She stood so still, she threw me to the dirt,
She tore -a my hide and she bruised my shirt.
From saddle to stirrup I mounted again,
And on my ten toes I rode over the plain.
Met the King and the Queen and a company more,
A-riding behind and a-marching before
Came a stark-naked drummer a-beating a drum
With his heels in his bosom come marching along.
They laughed and they smiled, not a soul did look gay,
They talked all the while, not a word they did say,
I bought me a quart to drive gladness away
And to stifle the dust, for it rained the whole day.
Sat down on a hard, hot cold frozen stone,
Ten thousand stood round me, and yet I's alone.
Took my hat in my hand for to keep my head warm,
Ten thousand got drownded that never was born.