SRFN Miscellany: Sabine Baring Gould: Essay on English Folk-Music, 1895: 3

http://folk-network.com/

SRFN: Miscellany:
Sabine Baring Gould:
Essay on English Folk-Music (3)

x	INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON ENGLISH FOLK-MUSIC
There was an old white-haired Cornish tanner I knew — alas! he is dead now. His father was a very strict Wesleyan, and when this tanner was a boy he used to get out of bed and the cottage, and steal away among the miners and listen to them singing their songs, and because his father allowed nothing to be sung except hymns, as a matter of course the lad retained every pot-house song he heard, and had forgotten all Wesley's hymns. Thus his retentive memory held the ballads and songs he had learned when he was a boy in 1829. A good many old airs and songs are to be got from gipsies.

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON ENGLISH FOLK-MUSIC

Mr. Bell, in his "Songs of the Peasantry," gives the ballad of the Birth of Edward VI. and the Death of Queen Jane as taken down from a gipsy girl. The late Dr. W. A. Barrett one day sang to me this ballad to an air that was of a very beautiful and skilful construction, taken down by him in Somersetshire, and, if my memory is correct, from a gipsy. I have had that ballad, but to a different air, from an old mason on the fringe of Dartmoor.

Dorothy Osborne has already been quoted, in my Introductory Essay (vol. i.), as speaking of the ballads sung by the shepherd-girls in her day. Isaak Walton bears like testimony, so does Pepys. Unhappily, collectors have spent money and pains on gathering the printed broadsides, and have supposed that these constituted the ballad poetry of the people. This was a mistake. They ought to have gone to the peasantry, and from them they would have reaped as rich a store of good early ballads as have been collected in Scotland. Most of our English ballads were re-written in the Stuart period in very villainous taste, and were then printed. But the people continued to sing the older ballads, and never took kindly to those which were re-shaped, because the metre was unsuited to the airs with which they were familiar. Now it is too late. All that we can recover are fragments, but the melodies are not wholly lost, and a fragment of an early ballad is precious when united to an ancient air.

The freaks of tradition are extraordinary. I recovered the tune of a hunting ballad that appears among the Roxburgh black-letter ballads of the second half of the seventeenth century, concerning a fox-chase by the Duke of Buckingham, which I suppose had never been printed. I have found songs by Henry Carey, who certainly was not a very original melodist, still sung by the peasantry, but greatly altered in form. Some modern songs have been completely transformed, whereas others of three centuries remain unaltered. The same melody, by alteration of time, is made to suit the most different ballads, and change their character completely. Let the air of "By chance it was I met my love" be compared with "The Roving Journeyman," and it will be seen how that the same melody forms an exquisitely dainty strain in one case, while the other is bluff and rude. Or again, take the air of the "Gipsy Countess," and compare it with the second version — it is the same air, to my mind, though Mr. Sheppard disagrees with me, yet how differently executed; and both are the same as "O good ale, thou art my darling," given in this volume. As a matter of fact, the peasant-singer knows no time; he sings as suits the sense of his words and according to the character of his ballad. This makes it a difficult matter to note down his melodies correctly; and indeed it is not possible to do them justice apart from the words.

There is an air given in "English Minstrelsie," vol. i., "A Damsel possessed of great Beauty." I put fresh words to it, as the original were sad rubbish. But the air has a history. We took it down not only to this song, but also to "When Adam was first a-created," or "Both Sexes give ear to my Fancy" (S. of W., c.). This is the same air that was used by Markordt for "In Hurry post-haste for a Licence," in "Tom Thumb," by Henry Fielding, 1780. It appears also as "Farewell, ye Green Fields and Sweet Groves," in "Vocal Music," 1772; but the first appearance of this air is in J. Sebastian Bach's "Bauern Cantate." In this, after a lady has sung a song in approved theatrical style, a peasant scoffs at it, says it is not music, and strikes up this identical air. Whether it was an old German melody used by Bach, or whether it was one common to England and Germany, one cannot be quite sure. *

Whether Markordt borrowed the air from Bach, direct, one does not know. Either through the song in "Tom Thumb," or through that in "Vocal Music," it must have soaked down to the peasantry of England, and now it is wedded to both the stupid song of "A Damsel possessed of great Beauty," and also to the very capital song of "Both Sexes give ear to my Fancy."

If from the song of the Ploughman and Dairymaid we pass to that of the sailor, we are not a little surprised to find that Jack Tar by no means sings nautical ballads exclusively, or indeed generally. He loves a sentimental song above all others, and very commonly his songs do not savour of the sea. No man wrote more sailor songs than did Charles Dibdin, who had been at sea only for a short passage from London to Portsmouth; yet his songs smack of salt water and smell of tar. Nevertheless they have not taken hold of the sailor, and I doubt if any of his have remained except "Nothing like Grog, " and "Tom Bowling."

Captain Marryat knew the sailor intimately, and the songs he puts into the mouth of Old Tom the lighterman, who had lost his legs at Trafalgar, are almost all of the sentimental order, "Alone by the Light of the Moon," "For the Murmur of thy Lip, Love," Sanderson's "Did you ne'er hear a Tale of a Maid in the Vale," "Come o'er the Sea, Maiden, to me," "Love's Young Dream," and the like.

There is no topic so dear to the rustic muse as that of the love-sick damsel who dresses herself up as a sailor or a soldier, and follows her lover in man's attire to sea, or to the wars.

* Mr. Kidson writes me that he has seen the air practically note for note in a Scottish MS. collection dating between 1735 and 1740, belonging to a friend. "Its popularity among English country folk shows that there is some probability of its having a British origin."

Previous: Pages vii - ix

Introduction

Next: Pages xii - xiv