Yorkshire · 1938–2002 · chansons, curates and one very dry wit
Jake Thackray
There was a time when British television booked a Yorkshire schoolteacher with a nylon-string guitar to sing songs about parish priests, missed buses and the quiet tragedies of small towns. He never sounded like anyone else.
Words · KULTUR
A French Teacher From Leeds
Track A — The songs
Jake Thackray arrived at the BBC from the provinces, almost by accident, and left the same way. A French teacher from Leeds, he had fallen in love with the chansons of Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel and began translating that sardonic, narrative tradition into his own Northern English. The result was a catalogue of songs that are funny, filthy, sad and precise — often in the same verse.
The Shrug in the Voice
Track B — The delivery
His voice was a low, conversational baritone with a built-in shrug. He picked classical guitar with a restraint that made every note sound earned. The subject matter was domestic: a vicar's wife in a hat shop, a lonely woman on a park bench, a man drowning in matrimonial habit. No big statements, no choruses that reached for the rafters. Just observation, delivered with a half-smile and a sting in the tail.
1967 — first LP, The Last Will and Testament of Jake Thackray. Forty years of songs still unmatched. BBC — the chat shows that never knew what to do with him. Yorkshire — the accent he never lost.