William Nathan ‘Jinky’ Wells

Jinky’ Wells was an acclaimed fiddle player with the Bampton (in-the-Bush) Morris side in Oxfordshire.

A key figure of traditional English fiddle playing, Jinky Wells played with the Bampton Morris, the only Morris side in the country with an unbroken tradition stretching back 600 years.

He became fiddler for Bampton in 1899 and was influential in his own day, even doing solo Morris tours singing, dancing and playing the fiddle. He was visited and recorded by many folklorists including Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp.

Unfortunately, most of the surviving recordings of his playing date from the 1930s onwards, when (in his 70s and arthritic) he was almost certainly past his ‘record by’ date.