Tingalary Man
Anyone from Yorkshire have memories of Tingalary men?
I raise the question in connection with the Bill Nelson song Tingalary Man And The Scarlet Fever Kid from Stereo Star Maps.
Found discussion at a forum called Secret Leeds where people shared memory fragments of older relatives in Yorkshire singing about the Tingalary Man.
Google image search yielded images from the Bradford Industrial Museum and a Wikipedia entry on the barrel organ. Also found The Tingalary Bird : A Theatre Piece For Children In Three Acts By Mary Melwood along with a painting by G.W. Birks.
"Even further back I remember Italians who played barrel organs, or tingalary, or hurdy-gurdy - each area of Bradford had their own names for these things. There were also ice-cream men who pulled a hand cart. Some even had a little monkey on their shoulder dressed in a coat and a fez."
Thanks for those memories, Mr Hodgson, from a time long past.
From Telegraph & Argus
Along with Bill’s The Tingalary Man And The Scarlet Fever Kid, there are songs that recall similar characters like Donovan’s The Hurdy Gurdy Man and Madness’s The Last Rag And Bone Man …
There used to be quite a popular saying around this neck of the woods, a good few years back,
.."I'm talking to the organ grinder, not the monkey"...and, various iterations of...no explanation necessary.
Don't hear it very often, nowadays...always made me smile, it took no prisoners.😁