Fact #156455

Ian Anderson : I was not the author of the Jethro Tull name. The original Jethro Tull was an 18th century agriculturalist... he was also something of an inventor. He invented the seed drill. He built his first prototype seed drill from the foot pedals of his local church organ... when it was suggested as one of our weekly names for our band in its early days by our agent we said 'OK, we'll be Jethro Tull this week.' The reason for all that was that we were not a terribly good group when we first started, and the only way we could get re-booked into the clubs we played at was to pretend to be somebody different every week... often we didn't know who we were - the agent forgot to tell us - so we would arrive at some club, and we'd look down the list of bands playing... whichever one we'd never heard of before, we knew that must be us. The time we got asked back to The Marquee club we had to stick with the name we had that week, which happened to be Jethro Tull. It's not a name I feel particularly wonderful about. I feel faintly embarrassed about it because it's not an original name. It's somebody else's name.
(Source : not known)