Nottamun Town: The Song That Became Masters of War

Nottamun Town sounds like nonsense until it starts sounding familiar.

A rider enters a strange town where nobody helps, nobody speaks plainly, and responsibility seems to have dissolved into fog. The word “Nottamun” may simply be a folk-process version of “Nottingham,” but it also opens another door: “not a man,” a place where human agency has disappeared.

This episode follows the song from the Ritchie family of Kentucky, through Jean Ritchie and the twentieth-century folk revival, to Jackie Washington’s minor, droning guitar arrangement. Bob Dylan heard Washington perform it at Gerde’s Folk City, and that pressure later reappeared in Masters of War. Dylan did not keep the riddle. He kept the accusation.

From Shirley Collins and Davy Graham to Bert Jansch, Fairport Convention, and Lady Maisery, Nottamun Town keeps finding new forms because disorder is portable. Every age has its own version of the town: people selling nothing, saying nothing, and calling it business.