(fl 1673–?1710). English musician, bookseller, and music publisher. He was made free of the Stationers’ Company by patrimony from his father (also John Crouch) in February 1673, but took up as a musician, and is first seen among a group of 12 players who accompanied Charles II to Windsor and Newmarket in the summer and autumn of 1679. He was subsequently appointed to the King’s Music as a ‘sackbut’ player (from December 1679) and also as a violinist (July 1682, in the place of Thomas Greeting, who had died in the wreck of HMS Gloucester two months previously). Probably in 1683 he set up a music-shop (‘The Three Lutes’) in Princes Street, off Drury Lane, Westminster, where he sold a variety of engraved and typeset music books, most of them in conjunction with other London publishers. The majority of Crouch’s early publications were small-scale songbooks, but as time went on he moved into instrumental collections as well. Of the 13 works known to have been sold by him between ...
