SRFN Miscellany: Sabine Baring Gould: Essay on English Folk-Music, 1895: 1

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SRFN: Miscellany:
Sabine Baring Gould:
Essay on English Folk-Music (1)

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON ENGLISH FOLK-MUSIC

T is not easy for me to say more on a topic already treated by me with some fulness in my introduction to "The Songs of the West," and also to "The Garland of Country Song." Nor, although I head this article Essay, can I do more than give personal reminiscences in Song-hunting.

That there has been folk-music in England, as certainly there has been in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, I take to be indisputable. A wiseacre of a reviewer of one of the above collections expressed his incredulity, because, said he, he had never heard the rustic sing anything except the last music-hall air, "Tarrara-boom-deay," or "Pop goes the Weasel." I have no doubt that he never did hear anything else, because he never placed himself in such situation as would enable him to hear English traditional folk-song.

Of late years there has been a cheap-jack travelling through Surrey and Sussex, and where he stops there he offers a kettle as a prize to any woman who will sing him the best ballad, and a spade to any man who will sing the best song. Probably the cheap-jack would apportion the prize to the singer who gave out that ballad or song which had been dearest to him as a child, as sung by his mother, and ten to one that song would be set in a Gregorian mode. There is a dear old fellow, a hedger, who has sung to me for the last ten years, an hereditary "song-man," who loves a minor melody, and who cannot appreciate one in the "modo lascivo," as was called the modern scale by the Italian church musicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Those who would hear the folk-music of our English peasantry must go amongst them, must gain their confidence, and must show them that their own hearts warm to one of the ancient melodies that are dear to the labourer in the fields. But it will be lost labour if they go to some of the prigs turned out by our Board Schools.

In Old England there was plenty of folk-music. The Harvest Homes, Whitsun Ales, Sheep-Shearing feasts, and Bell-Ringers' suppers were occasions when such songs came out. But these popular gatherings of the people are gone, and their places taken by Harvest and Missionary teas, to which the women flock, but from which men keep away.

Under the date 1778, William Gardiner of Leicester writes in the third volume of his "Music and Friends":—

"With what glee did I mount the harvest waggon for the fun of jolting over the rugged roads to the wheat-field. From shock to shock it slowly moved to gather the rustling sheaves. In the rear of the reapers were a flock of shearers — some pretty village girls — for one of whom I would have pilfered some ears to enrich her store, had I dared do so. The day's toil over, we hastened home for the harvest supper. At the head of the board sat the worthy host, by whose side I was placed. Then came Will, Ralph, Joe, and Jim, with their wives and helpers. Presently a shoulder of mutton, scorching hot, as the day had been, a plum-pudding, and a roasted goose were put on the table, when they soon fell to, each playing his part in good earnest. The gingered ale went merrily round. Joe, who was a good singer, was called upon to entertain the company. Seeing them tippling a little too fast, he admonished them in the following song:—

'Beware of swallowing too much ale;
The more you drink,
The worse you think;
Perchance your health and purse will fail;
Beware of swallowing too much ale.'

The jokes growing coarser as it grew late, I was taken to bed from a scene not to be imitated. Perhaps there is no period in which we enjoy these rural pleasures as in the time of our youth."

William Gardiner says that in his boyhood, during the last half of last century, a man named Davy Black lived in a thatched cottage among the ruins of Leicester Abbey. "Black was a very pleasant fellow, enjoyed his pipe

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON ENGLISH FOLK-MUSIC

and a jug of mild ale, was fond of music, and sang a good song. In the better sort of public-houses it was not uncommon for half-a-dozen good voices to fire off song after song the night through. There was singular humour in our friend Davy's performance of the following:-

'I know that I went to the fair,
The miller's daughter, Sue, was there;
Her beauty made me gape and stare,
A woeful sight for John.
I fell in love upon the place;
I told her my unhappy case;
Yet still she turned away her face,
And bid me get me gone.'

It was accompanied by a boon companion of his, with a twanging sound through the nose, like a pizzicato bass, that had a droll, and not unpleasant effect."

"At this time," — the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, — says William Gardiner again, "every village had its wake, and the lower orders were comparatively in a state of ease and plenty. Then every place was proud of its maypole and spacious green, kept for sports and pastimes; but what contributed to their solid comforts was their common and open field, upon which they kept their pig and poultry, and sometimes a cow. When the wake came, the stocking-maker had peas and beans in his snug garden, and a good barrel of humming ale. The year was checquered with holidays, wakes, and fairs; it was not one dull round of labour. The maypole with its pastimes, and the games of singlestick and wrestling, have now disappeared. These were the sports of the ruder parts of the peasantry; the artisans, who were more cultivated, had their amusements at home; they were members of the village choir, and on the Wake Sunday every one who had a voice, and could lend a hand with hautboy, bassoon, or flute, repaired to the singing loft in the church, to swell with heart and voice the psalm or anthem — the clowns below gaping with mute surprise. At Rathby a family of the Smedleys, from Derbyshire, attended the wake every year. They were the last of the minstrels in this part of the country. These itinerant musicians joined the choir on the Wake Sunday, with assistants from the neighbouring villages, produced what was called a grand crash, that never failed to fill the church. The music at Sapcote wake was still more respectable, as the choir was supported by an opulent farmer of the name of Smith. He was a tall, stout man, with an extraordinarily powerful voice, and while singing accompanied himself on the violoncello. His plan was to place the instrument on a chair, standing up to play it, and in a solo would exert himself with a degree of enthusiasm that delighted some, and surprised every one."

The William Gardiner, from whom I have made these quotations, was a singular man, an enthusiast for sacred music, and a stocking-maker in Leicester. He evinced his admiration for Haydn by sending him six pairs of stockings from his own loom, with the music of "My mother bids me bind my hair," "The leviathan," the sonata, "Consummatum est," the andante in the "Surprise symphony," and the Austrian National Anthem woven into the fabric.

By some curious fatality no collectors of English folk-music arose, and it has been allowed to pass away, to a large extent beyond recall. Some of our folk-airs have been appropriated by the Scotch, some by the Irish. At Vauxhall a brisk manufacture went on of Scotch songs that were regularly accepted North of the Tweed, but English airs of home-growth among the people were contemptuously disregarded. Only now and then did such men as Paul Bedford, or Hudson, or Sam Cowell take them up, and then, as often as not, it was to vulgarise them by setting to them words of low buffoonery.

Sir F. A. Gore-Ouseley, in his chapters on English Music in E. Naumann's "History," says in regard to the national popular airs and dance music of England: "Here we may fairly challenge comparison with the folk-songs of all other European nations. Yet there have not been wanting writers who have unscrupulously assigned to most of the best English tunes a Scotch, Welsh ,or Irish origin. Each has its own characteristic beauties; those of England are by no means inferior to the rest." As a fact, just as negro serenade songs have been manufactured by English composers — (for instance, Blewitt set the song,

"I cam from Ole Kentucky a long time ago,
Where I first learnt to wheel about and jump Jim Crow,"

to the old English tune of "The Wiltshire Wedding"), — and palmed off as negro melodies, and many of the popular

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON ENGLISH FOLK-MUSIC

iii

nigger tunes hail from England — so have we composed vast quantities of imitation Scotch and Irish tunes, and those early English airs that were popular passed wherever the English tongue was spoken, and north of the Tweed were associated with Scotch words, and return to us in this form. As Chappell says of Hogg's "Jacobite Relics," one half of the airs are of demonstrably English origin.

In Germany, if out of their collections of Volks-lieder we sift the compositions of Kreutzer, Reichardt, Weber, Arndt, Methfessel, Nägeli, there is very little of genuine folk-production left. Out of 56 hunting songs in "Hundert und fünfzig Jäger, Soldaten und Volkslieder," Leipzig, n.d., 25 are by known authors; out of 59 Volkslieder, 19 are by known authors or are ecclesiastical melodies; and 23 can alone be claimed as genuine productions of the people.

According to a French authority on the popular music of the peasantry on Gallic soil, nearly all their folk-airs are reminiscences of the dramatic melodies of Lulli and his time, hardly a one a genuine spontaneous creation of the people.

In England we had the musicians of our cathedrals and theatres dipersed at the great Rebellion, and they settled down in country-houses, and I have little doubt but that to them we owe the great amount of musical culture there was among the people throughout last century. The orchestras in every parish church, however small, show that there were musicians everywhere, and where there are musicians, there is sure to be musical creation; these old church singers and fiddlers composed tunes and set them circulating in their own neighbourhoods, and there they have remained, traditional to the present day.

Mr. Wedmore, in an article in "The Friends' Quarterly Examiner" on English Music (July 1896), says: "There is a peculiar fascination about these folk-songs, preserved for so long, passed down from father to son, thus and thus alone kept alive; and there is a debt of gratitude due to the aged custodians of these valuable relics of the past. The men who have sung them are nearly all gone. I heard of one who 'was a terrible zinger; he could zing a terrible lot; he was a musicianer'; but he was dead. Of another, an old crippled farm labourer, who was 'no scholard,' told me: 'You can't beat th' old uns. The postman's father used to sing; he 'ud ketch 'em from his father; he c'ud sing fifty songs.'

"I came across one, however, last summer, on the hills in Somerset, where there are many sweet nooks full of national treasure. Coleridge lived amongst them, so did Wordsworth, both giving us gems of song written under the inspiration and solace of their spell. I was resting in a delightful little village — shopless and without a licence. Everybody there was cared for, and there I learned to love the people. It was beyond the railway and beyond the telegraph. It lay near an old coach-road, traversed now by a conveyance from which it was a relief to alight. Abutting on the churchyard stood its fine Manor Hall (1581), with its banqueting-room overlooked by a minstrel's gallery. The village folk shared with those of other villages the advantages of a school. The parson knew the cottagers; he would visit the sick, and watch the games of the lusty. He came over the hills to prosecute his ministrations. He went over the hills to fetch home his bride, after having declared his own banns in the midst of his parishioners. Amongst them was a man at once sexton, bellringer, carpenter, and postmaster, whose wife was the oldest inhabitant. A courtly manner well became her. 'A Fine Old English Gentleman' was the song she sang me, having kept it over sixty years.

"On another occasion, a picture of peasant-life presented itself in a picturesque village in a Devonshire hollow. On our arrival, we alighted unexpectedly in the midst of a summer fête. There was a pause between the games and the dance. The people were grouped in merry talk or silent sympathy. The musicians strike up a lively refrain: a change comes over the scene. Amongst most of the folk there is a movement; the younger ones take another spell of enjoyment, rhythmic as the tune; whilst some of their elders gather their wraps around them, for the twilight comes on apace, and there is a feeling of chilliness in the vicinity of rank grass, leafy canopy, and rushing streams. In the words of the old song—

'The streams of Nantsian in two parts divide,
Where the young men in dancing meet sweetheart and bride;
The streams bright and shining, though parted in twain,
Re-unite intertwining, one thenceforth remain.'

"The following morning a moorside walk brought us to another interesting little village. Here the clerk of the parish took us to the cottage of a hale old man who could sing, and who then and there gave us out of the stores of his memory (for he could neither read nor write) song after song — veritable folk-songs. His cottage was typical of old times. The house-door opened directly into the living-room; the stairs were close at hand; you could sit in the

iv	INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON ENGLISH FOLK-MUSIC
chimney-corner, and up the wide chimney see the sky; whilst the kettle hung above the wood fire on the ground. A settle kept the draught from the entrance; the walls were lined with pictures, china, odds and ends of slight money value, but of strong family interest. The old people were still able to do for themselves. Their wants were few; their vision of the world was not wide, but in spirit they followed the fortunes of children gone out into it. Such are some of the people and their surroundings, who have preserved the store of folk-songs. We have the privilege of listening to the melodies and associated ballads, tunes, and stories that stirred the people generations ago, in their modes, intervals, and rhythm so different to the declamatory, luscious, or nondescript song of the present day — a day of compromises, competition, and so-called social obligations, modern influences which act prejudicially on the character of music, and tend towards outpourings of uninspired effort." What first made me collect the songs of the people in Devon and Cornwall was this. One evening I was dining with a dear friend, Mr. Radford of Mount Tavy, near Tavistock — that was in 1887. The conversation turned on some old hunting songs, especially one called "The Hunting of Arscott of Tetcott," and it was lamented that though the words had been preserved the tune was lost. Then my host turned to me and said, "Why do not you set to work to collect our old songs?" I considered, and answered, "I suspect we shall hardly find as many as may be counted on one hand. There is 'Arscott of Tetcott.' There is 'Widecombe Fair.' Who knows another?" As I drove home I considered. I remembered how that as a boy I had heard plenty of old songs sung by labourers, and I had had a nurse who sang for ever. So I began to inquire whether any old singing men remained in my own neighbourhood; and I wrote to the West of England papers asking for old songs, but got nothing beyond "Widecombe Fair" and "Arscott of Tetcott." Then a gentleman at South Brent wrote to me — quite a stranger — to say that there were a miller and a stonebreaker near him who were reputed to be song-men. Would I visit him and see what I could get? My host who had invited me, had invited neighbours to dinner to meet me; and after dinner the entire party adjourned to the roomy, warm, and pleasant kitchen, where we found the miller and the stonebreaker, and the wife of the former in an old white mob-cap. They were seated by the fire, with a table before them on which stood grog. A good supper and a roaring fire — the time was mid-winter — made the old people so happy that they were quite ready to warble. The servants of the house sat along one side of the kitchen, the guests on the other. The old fellows sang some times in parts with great effect, the old woman striking in with a curious faux bourdon. When they ceased singing we applauded; then came a lull, during which the roar of the river Avon, that leaps and brawls through a cleft of rocks, and thunders over a cascade hard by, filled the kitchen, like the murmur of an angry sea. This was, of course, not quite the way in which to do things; however, it was a beginning, and we stayed some days at South Brent, and had first the miller, then the old crippled stonebreaker, to the house, and got from them all we could. Two years later, on looking over my collection, it occurred to me that the old stonebreaker, Robert Hard, had not been squeezed dry; and I went to South Brent by an early train one November day, and the rector kindly gave me up a room and his piano and sent for the old man, who, lame in both legs, soon arrived hobbling on two sticks. I retained him from 9.30 A.M. to 6.30 P.M., with only the interval of the midday meal; and I believe I got from him all he knew. I received on that occasion a dozen good airs with the words. A few months later — two only, I believe — the poor old man was found dead in the road. In returning home at night he had stumbled, had fallen, and, being unable to raise himself, had died of cold. A hedger I knew met with a serious accident. He was the son of a "singing-machine." His father was a pro-

	INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON ENGLISH FOLK-MUSIC	v
-fessional song-man, who once for a bet sang from sundown to sunrise without ever repeating a ballad. The son himself, an old man and a grandfather, is a rare singer. His memory is stored with grand old airs, some of the choicest I have collected. Many a winter evening have we sat together in my hall, by a blazing fire, he on the settle, singing to me his venerable ballads. Poor man, he met with a bad accident; but on his sick-bed he piped to me some songs he had recollected while lying ill, and which he had not hitherto surrendered. When I had made a resolve to collect the folk-music of the West of England, my difficulty was how to get it noted down. The singing of our peasant song-men is very peculiar, with wonderful twirls, and they love a great range of notes, often rising to falsetto. Now I myself can note a melody if I can bring my singer to a piano; but I cannot write — or, as he would say, prick down — the air without this assistance. I might, perhaps, induce an old minstrel to come to my house, but the majority of singers were not to be lured from their own houses any further than the tavern, and in neither was there a piano. Moreover, a singer was uncomfortable in a strange house, nervous and shy. It was essential to put him completely at his ease. So I was obliged to turn to a skilled musician, and I at once wrote to my friend, the Rev. H. Fleetwood Sheppard, Rector of Thurnscoe, in Yorkshire, to come to my aid. Yorkshire is a long way off, and at first he somewhat doubted whether the material to be dealt with would be worth the pains of coming so far south. However, during the winter of 1888-9 I was able to send him some I had taken down from the old hedger who lived in my neighbourhood, named James Parsons, and Mr. Sheppard at once saw that here was a vein of pure gold, and in the summer he paid me a long visit, and we worked hard together on and around Dartmoor, and this was but the prelude to many other visits and many other excursions, extending beyond the county of Devon into Cornwall. I was further happy in having the assistance of the Rev. F. W. Bussell, Fellow, now Vice-Principal, of Brazenose, at the time of Magdalen College, Oxford, a brilliant and accomplished musician, who at the time spent his vacations in a house belonging to me, and within a gunshot of my door. With the readiest good-humour he allowed me to command his services, either to pump some singer whom I had netted and drawn into my study, or to go with me long excursions in quest of singers who were at a distance. Mr. Bussell was remarkable for the extreme accuracy with which he noted every twist and flourish of the singer. Nothing escaped him. What characterised Mr. Sheppard's work in the "Songs of the West" was the ability with which he would take a dozen versions of the same melody as noted down in as many places, often widely removed, and think them over till he had discovered what was the mother-form of the melody from which the various variants had risen, or the form which he was convinced was that most accurate, and to be distinguished from corruptions. And it must be noted that, after a while, we came to see that when a singer had been singing for some time he lost his power of individualising a melody, and that his later tunes were coloured and debased by admixture of strains already used in the airs he had previously sung. When we were thus in doubt about a melody sung, perhaps after a score of others, we laid it aside, waited a few days, and then asked the man to begin with that song, whereupon we were able to correct the errors on the previous occasion. To Mr. Sheppard and Mr. Bussell a debt of gratitude is due, for having saved from extinction some splendid melodies, as fresh as buttercups, and as genuine as can well be conceived. In the heart of Dartmoor, eleven hundred feet above the sea, is a hamlet called Post-Bridge. It lies in the bottom of a basin among the moors, which surround it on all sides, rising to something like a thousand feet above it. Owing to its being in comparative shelter, a few stunted beech trees live there. A few moor farms are scattered about it, and near it was a promising rather than rendering tin mine. The spot is very wild, desolate, and picturesque. The hills around are strewn with pre-historic relics. About a mile from the road across bogs without road, not even a track, stands Ring Hill, a granite cottage, near a plantation of stunted trees, that grow in the midst of an old fortified village of those mysterious people who once lived in vast numbers on Dartmoor. In this little cottage was a blind man, aged eighty-eight, named Jonas Coaker, who was called the Poet of the Moor. I found him very feeble, lying in bed the greater part of the day, but able to come down and sit by his peat fire for a couple of hours. He was too weak to sing, but he could recite ballads, and the captain of the tin mine came in and sang to us the melodies. A stone-cutter I know has a rare memory. His father deserted him and his mother when he was six years old. Many years after as this lad, grown to a man, was passing a cottage, he saw a man standing in the doorway with his hand on the jamb, leaning in and speaking to the inmate of the cottage. Something in the creases or configuration of the hand struck him as familiar, and he exclaimed, "That is my father's hand!" The person alluded to turned and hastily walked away. My friend, Sam Fone, inquired about this strange man, and heard that he was lodging at a farm

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON ENGLISH FOLK-MUSIC

in the parish. He went there next morning to ask about him, and to learn who and what he was, but heard that the stranger had precipitately left. "Did you notice anything peculiar about him?" he inquired. "Nothing," answered the farmer's wife, "but that he pours melted fat into his boots before putting them on." "Then he is my father," said Sam Fone. Now, when a little urchin, Sam was wont to carry milk every day for an aged widow, and as she was too poor to pay him with coin, she rewarded him with an old ballad that she taught him; these he has never forgotten, and lo! now after nearly seventy years, he gets repaid in shillings for every can of milk he carried and every ballad he then acquired. At one time Fone worked with an old mason who was a great singer. This man fell from a ladder and broke his neck, but Fone has all his store of songs by heart. I believe this man knows well nigh a hundred and fifty or two hundred songs, ballads, words, and melodies. The other day, a concert of old west country songs was given at Tavistock by professionals in costume. Fone was present, at the back of the hall, and would sing out every song with which he was familiar, along with the performer, somewhat to the disconcertion of the artist, but to the amusement of the audience.

One evening Mr. Bussell and I went to South Zeal, under the roots of Cosdon, one of the highest points of Dartmoor. I had been there twice before to break ground and rub away any little hesitation or shyness that might exist

among the old singers there, and I had invited him to the inn, the "Oxenham Arms," that evening to sing to me. The "Oxenham Arms" is an Elizabethan house, once the mansion of the Burgoynes', with mullioned windows and carved oak panelling.

The tidings spread that there was to be a concert of song, and the inn kitchen was crowded that evening. Not only did nearly all the men of Zeal come, but the passage to the kitchen was crammed with their wives and daughters, and boys were outside, standing on each other's shoulders, listening with their ears at the window-panes. In that crowd we could not collect much; naturally the old song-men sought to please the audience, and for that purpose did not sing their quaintest songs. However, the ice was broken, and later we went there again, and had the old fellows in separately to supper and a glass of grog, and thus enjoyed a good many hours of song.

One day Mr. Sheppard and I were on Dartmoor; we had a driver, and he sang to us a quaint ballad. The horse was stopped whilst words and air were noted down. Then we reached a tumble-down hovel, in which lived an old woman, who could neither read nor write, and we had to take down her songs. She was rather shy, and was, moreover, busy; so we had to follow her about to the pigstye, to the hearth, to the water, and get her airs and words as best we could. I had been there before with Mr. Bussell, and then he sat on the boiler noting down her melodies, till the daughter put fire below, and made him jump off. After we had got all from this old woman that we thought she was inclined to yield, we left, and returned homewards; but, halfway, I turned to Mr. Sheppard and said, "We have not yet exhausted her store. You must go back, and don't let her go till she drives you away with the pitchfork," and like a zealous and conscientious collector, back he went. From this old grandmother we had— "Lord Thomas and the Fair Eleanor;" "Deep in Love" (S. of W., lxxxvi.); "The Loyal Lovers" (S. of W., xcii.); "The False Lovers" (S. of W., xcvii.); "The Lady and the Apprentice," and others.

Introduction

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