If you comb through the holiday catalog for songs about baked goods, you’ll find the ones about fruitcake are almost resoundingly negative! I get it, fruitcake is a very old timey treat that most modern palates don’t love, but in the right hands it can be really really good! My wife made a bunch of fruitcakes for one of our first Christmases and they turned out terrific. People put booze in these things. Fruitcakes have their place. And as the late Jimmy Buffett once sang, “we need more fruitcakes in this world,” even if he wasn’t quite singing about actual cakes.
Now that I’ve gotten my half-hearted defense of fruitcake out there, let’s turn to the music. Clinton Ford was the UK’s preeminent pre-rock pop singer who shares names with two American presidents. Here he’s singing a well-traveled ditty about a baker whose cake should be avoided at all costs. In some versions of the song she’s known as Miss Fogarty or Mrs. Fogarty, though the name Miss Hooligan definitely fits the mood for this version.
