"Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll)" is a song by English rock musician George Harrison from his 1970 triple album All Things Must Pass. Harrison wrote the song as a tribute to Frank Crisp, a nineteenth-century lawyer and the original owner of Friar Park – the Victorian Gothic residence in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, that Harrison purchased in early 1970. Commentators have likened the song to a cinematic journey through the grand house and the grounds of the estate.
Pete Drake, Billy Preston, Gary Wright, Klaus Voormann and Alan White played on the recording. It was co-produced by Phil Spector, whose heavy use of reverb adds to the ethereal quality of the song. AllMusic critic Scott Janovitz describes "Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let It Roll)" as offering "a glimpse of the true George Harrison – at once mystical, humorous, solitary, playful, and serious".
Crisp's eccentric homilies, which the former Beatle discovered inscribed inside the house and around the property, inspired subsequent compositions of Harrison's, including "Ding Dong, Ding Dong" and "The Answer's at the End". Together with the Friar Park-shot album cover for All Things Must Pass, "Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp" established an association between Harrison and his Henley estate that has continued since his death in November 2001. The song gained further notability in 2009 when it provided the title for Harrison's posthumous compilation Let It Roll. My Morning Jacket lead singer Jim James and Dhani Harrison are among the singers who have recorded the song.
Background
Since 1965, George Harrison and his wife, Pattie Boyd, had lived in Kinfauns in Surrey, south of London. The house was a bungalow and too small to accommodate a home recording studio, so the couple began a year-long search for a larger property, concentrating on an area west of London encompassing the counties of Berkshire and Oxfordshire. In January 1970, Harrison purchased the 120-room Friar Park, set on 33 acres of land, just west of Henley-on-Thames. Previously the home of an order of Roman Catholic nuns, the Salesians of Don Bosco, the four-storey house and its grounds were in a dilapidated state, and it was not until the start of March that Harrison and Boyd moved from a worker's cottage and into the main residence.
The house was built in 1898, on the site of a thirteenth-century monastery, by Sir Frank Crisp, a successful City of London solicitor, microscopist and horticulturalist well known for his eccentricities. Harrison described Crisp as a cross between Lewis Carroll and Walt Disney. While compiling Harrison's autobiography, I, Me, Mine, in the late 1970s, Derek Taylor observed that Harrison "frequently talks as if [Crisp] were still alive". Clean-up work during the first few months at Friar Park unearthed various legacies of Crisp's time there, such as stone and wood engravings containing whimsical homilies, some of which the Salesian nuns had concealed or painted over. The 10 acres of Crisp's formal gardens were so overrun with weeds that Harrison and his friend from the Hare Krishna movement, Shyamasundar Das, used World War II-era flamethrowers to clear some of the land. Among the garden features was a series of tiered lakes connected by tunnels, to the south-east of the house, and an Alpine rock garden topped by a 20-foot replica of the Matterhorn, to the north-west.
On 17 March 1970, despite the property's state of disrepair, the Harrisons threw a party to celebrate Pattie's 26th birthday and St Patrick's Day. According to their friend and assistant Chris O'Dell, the guest list comprised all the other Beatles and their wives, as well as insiders such as Derek and Joan Taylor, Neil Aspinall and his wife Susie, Peter Brown, and Klaus and Christine Voormann. In what was a rare social get-together for the Beatles, three weeks before Paul McCartney announced he was leaving the band, the party was a "great success", O'Dell writes. Shortly afterwards, Harrison invited members of the London-based Hare Krishna movement to help with the restoration work, primarily in the grounds of Friar Park, and accommodated the devotees and their families in a wing of the house. While satisfying Harrison's spiritual convictions, these visitors proved less welcome to Boyd, who found herself shut out of her husband's life.