CHARLESHENDY: It was a hymn originally, called “Virgin Mary Had A Little Baby”, and then I think Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez, maybe some other people, started doing it. So in the folk clubs in England and Edinburgh, and I’m sure Ireland as well, a lot of people would perform it constantly. It was kind of a standard. But these two lads, Ron Clark and Carl MacDougall, wrote it because they were at a session in Edinburgh, and people kept singing [piously] “Virgin Mary had a little baby/Glory hallelujah”, so they wrote a song about ‘Hairy Mary’, who’s a character in Scotland like Molly Malone in Ireland. So they just wrote it about immaculate conception of a different kind. It’s a fucking amazing song and a very strange melody. Actually, Hamish Imlach, who made the song popular, his albums are fucking amazing. It’s not standard folk. He does this Lead Belly song called “Jean Harlow (Died The Other Day)”, and the way he plays it is fucking mad – the chorus goes “Jean Harlow died the other day”, and then there’s this explosion sound, so he’s like sampling, long before we were doing it, you know. Mad shit. I’d have loved to have seen Hamish Imlach play live as I imagine he was an incredibly entertaining performer. He loved the craic, you know?
Cod-like genius: Hamish Imlach, 1967