Scarborough Fair

It is a traditional ballad, Roud 12 and Child 2, "The Elfin Knight", credited as traditional on the 1965 album, where it is track 8 at 3:25. According to Wikipedia, citing BBC Sold on Song, Carthy picked up the tune from the MacColl and Seeger songbook; MacColl collected the melody from Mark Anderson in 1947, and Folkworks says instead that Carthy learned it from Anderson's 1953 Lomax recording. He replaced the final verse with a repeat of the opening stanza. Paul Simon learned it from him in London in 1965, and Simon and Garfunkel combined it with "Canticle", from Simon's 1963 "The Side of a Hill", on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (1966) and the soundtrack of The Graduate. The copyright credited only Simon and Garfunkel, and their single reached 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968; those figures belong to their version, not Carthy's.

Carthy told Uncut, per Guitar.com in January 2024, that he was a fool to eventually allow the music industry to get control of the song, and that he laid the ghost to rest with Simon's help. Simon invited him to sing it at Hammersmith Apollo in London on October 25, 2000. Whether he took legal action is unverified. Single sources say his version influenced Dylan's "Girl from the North Country" and "Boots of Spanish Leather". On the 2025 album Carthy re-recorded it from a Cecil Sharp recording he first heard when asked to perform it for the 2014 television series Remember Me. We do not know whether our upload is the 1965 or the 2025 version.