This book presents the core tradition of English folk song, as reflected in the major and minor collections compiled from about 1870 to the 1970s and 1980s. It therefore includes many of the most popular traditional songs from the long-gone era when singing out loud was normal everyday behaviour and music was largely a participatory rather than a spectator activity.
The original edition of The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, edited by Ralph Vaughan Williams and A. L. Lloyd, was a brilliant piece of work and has been a classic ever since it was published in 1959. Vaughan Williams was one of the last survivors of the great days of the Edwardian folk-song collectors and the grand old man of the English musical establishment, although he died just before the project was completed. By contrast, Lloyd was a journalist and free-lance writer who was one of the most vocal of the new Folk Revival activists, criticizing, questioning, and politically committed to spreading the word of folk song to the people. The book came at just the right moment, when there was a groundswell of feeling among the Folk Revivalists in England that the national tradition was being neglected in the welter of American, Irish and Scottish material which had thus far fuelled the movement. In an uncanny parallel to the general perception in the Victorian and Edwardian eras that the English had no decent music, it was felt there was a danger the new generation of ‘folk singers’ would know about songs from every nation but their own. The word ‘English’ in the new title was therefore a significant element. The book quickly became a key text for the Folk Revival in this country, and not only supplied the repertoire for countless club singers (being conveniently pocket size), but also prompted enthusiasts to seek out other English sources.
Vaughan Williams and Lloyd took their material from a single, albeit long-running, source: the journals of the Folk-Song Society (1899–1932) and its successor, the English Folk Dance and Song Society (1932 onwards). Both societies had prided themselves upon presenting the material in their journals in a plain and unadulterated fashion, with the tunes printed exactly as collected from the original singers, without amendment or accompaniment, therefore making them the real thing. In the earlier volumes of the journals, however, the texts were not so delicately handled. They were often cut short, with only one verse or a representative sample given, and if they were printed in full were sometimes completed from broadsides. Vaughan Williams and Lloyd therefore had to complete many of their texts by taking elements from other versions.
As with most folk-song collections down the years, Vaughan Williams and Lloyd were not looking for the normal and typical, or to present a view of the tradition as a whole, but were concerned with choosing the ‘best’ of folk songs. They therefore often selected the special and unusual, based largely on aesthetic grounds. ‘All Things are Quite Silent’, for example, the first song in the book, was extremely rare in the tradition, having been collected only once. The present volume takes a different tack, and is the first to do so for some time. Conscious of the fact that we now have access to much more material than any of our predecessors, we have tried to ascertain which songs were collected most often, and to use this as a ranking, however crude, of popularity within the tradition at large.
If one follows the theory that it is selection by the community which ensures continuity (see below), it can be inferred that the songs which were widely sung must have had some quality that made them survive better than others. From the thousands of examples of songs in books, manuscripts, sound recordings and videos, we have looked specifically at those which were collected widely, and made our selection from them. This may well be a simplistic evolutionary argument, and we are aware that in other contexts, such as the modern world of pop music, it could be maintained that widespread popularity is a sign of the lowest common denominator rather than of quality. There is no objective standard here, all is necessarily subjective, but as stated already, what we have tried to do is reflect the core tradition of the English folk-song repertoire, on the evidence of those collections and such ancillary historical information at our disposal.
This is not as simple as it sounds. The available collections were selective and patchy when compiled (see below), and some have not yet been indexed, but with these reservations a fairly clear picture emerges. We set the lower limit of a song’s inclusion in this volume at about fifteen versions (from different singers across the country), but in this context it is not so much the absolute numbers which are significant, but the relative proportions. Some of the songs just scrape in at the lower level, while others romp home with dozens of versions and some with well over a hundred. In other words, in terms of popularity, some songs stand in a completely different class to the mass.
Using this method, we had an overall corpus of about 300 from which to make our selection. However, the book is not simply an exercise in ranking songs solely by popularity (The Folk Song Index can do that, see pp. xl–xli), and we decided not to take this scheme to its logical conclusion and merely present the most collected songs as a sort of ‘top 151’. We also wanted to indicate the range of songs and tunes available, and to provide the next generation of enthusiasts with a corpus of material which we considered worth investigating in order to build an all-round knowledge of the field.
We have tried to present versions that use the tune and text from the same singer, and if possible to select texts which are sufficiently complete for us not to need to do too much patching from other versions, although a certain amount of that is always necessary in a book aimed at the general public. Our other selection criteria have been concerned with geographical coverage, gender balance, and roughly equal numbers from the different periods in our date range. About half the songs are taken from sound recordings of some sort, so those who wish to hear them sung in the old way can do so, while the others exist in written form and need more expert interpretation. In the latter case, it is often possible to find recorded examples of other versions (again, see The Folk Song Index) for those who wish to seek them out.
Inevitably, some imbalances have been introduced by our selection criteria. Selecting material on a national scale necessarily militates against songs which are popular only locally. The insistence on text and tune from one singer excludes important collections, such as the one made by Alfred Williams in the Upper Thames region, as he did not note down the tunes. We have also largely avoided versions printed in Vaughan Williams and Lloyd’s Penguin volume and in current English Folk Dance and Song Society publications, notably from the Hammond and Gardiner manuscript collections. And we have left out some categories altogether – sea shanties and other work songs, songs related to calendar customs (for example, May garlands and wassailing), children’s games and rhymes – and have included only a small selection of carols and religious items.
Folk-Song Characteristics
The definition of ‘folk song’ is fraught with difficulty, and many researchers even avoid the term altogether. Those who are interested in pursuing the subject will find some discussion on the matter later in this Introduction, but for now a simple description will suffice. Folk songs are learnt and performed by non-professionals in informal, non-commercial settings. They are ‘traditional’ in that they are passed on from person to person, and down the generations, in face-to-face performance. It is not the origin of a song which makes it a ‘folk song’, but the process by which ordinary people learn it, perform it and pass it on. It is therefore not really the song which is ‘folk’, but the process of learning and performance.
In 1907 Cecil Sharp proposed a three-part scheme – continuity, selection and variation – which goes some way to describing the characteristics of a folk song. Continuity refers to the song’s surviving by being passed on from person to person, and down the generations; selection refers to the role played by the community in choosing which songs survive – if no one chooses to learn a song it will not survive; variation highlights the fact that because songs travel informally from singer to singer, changes will always occur, whether consciously or not, and even successive performances by the same singer will never be exactly the same.
While we tend to think of folk songs as special, they were in their time everyday music. The ‘educated’ classes may not have performed them, or even recognized them as culturally significant or valid, but the bulk of ‘the people’ did. Nevertheless, such singing traditions gradually, inexorably, went out of fashion and ceased to be viable.
In the period with which we are concerned, farmworkers sang these songs in fields, barns and at harvest homes, as did milkmaids in their cowsheds, factory workers at their machines, coal miners above and below ground, women doing the washing or sweeping up at home, families round the fireside, drinkers in the pub, nursemaids to their infant charges, scullery maids sweeping the area steps, delivery and messenger boys going down the street, carriers driving their horses and the people sitting in the cart behind them, children on their way to school, sailors at rest in the forecastle, fishermen hauling nets, ballad singers in city streets and at country fairs, and so on. They were sung solo and in unison, to large crowds or for the singer’s own pleasure, raucously and tenderly, extremely well and rather badly. A handful of songs were centuries old, while others had recently filtered through from the pleasure gardens or music halls, that is, they were the pop music of the day, or rather the day before. But all had been around long enough to have been passed on from person to person and to have had their corners knocked off, and all were performed in the locally accepted and sanctioned style.
No subjects are barred to folk song, but the genre is hardly suited to heavy discussion of politics, religion or other weighty matters, and protest songs rarely lasted long. In fact, the songs are usually about the daily concerns of the time – drinking, poaching, hunting, seafaring, battles, highwaymen, farmwork and murder – and the vast majority are simply about love, sex and relationships. In folk songs, parents object to suitors (and sometimes murder them), ladies fancy ploughboys, squires pursue milkmaids, lovers go to war and return in disguise or are killed, girls dress as sailors to follow their lovers to sea, sweethearts get married or are abandoned, women become pregnant and sing ruefully of their condition, commit suicide, shrug philosophically or get their own back on their seducers.
It is not exactly real life that is reflected in the song repertoire, of course, but the stylized and romanticized view which one encounters in all forms of fiction. And as the times move on faster than the folk songs do, a song about the press gang can still be sung fifty years after the last man was forced to sea, and a ballad about Dick Turpin is not likely to be about the real man and his sordid career, but the one whom legend has refashioned as a hero. Songs about Van Diemen’s Land were written by those who had never been there, and remnants of stage fashions for pseudo-classical pastoral shepherdesses and Gipsies rub shoulders with songs about the real thing. Songs can be funny, tragic, complete nonsense or deadly serious; some tell a detailed story while others are lyrical explorations of feelings. Some have rousing choruses, others are more introspective, but all have great tunes – or they would not have survived.
History of Folk-Song Collectors and Collecting
To understand the genre of folk song, and the selection process involved in writing books such as this one, it is necessary to investigate two very different types of history. One is the history of vernacular songs and singing – where the songs came from; who sang them; how, why, where they were sung, and so on – which will be tackled later. The other history, an account of how people (that is, educated, book-writing people) discovered folk song, defined it, collected it and published it, explains not only the corpus of material that is at our disposal, but also how we define and view the genre. It has to be remembered, of course, that the ‘folk’ did not need to discover folk song: they had it all along, although they did not call it that.
The folk-song ‘movement’ began to take real shape in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but its intellectual roots go back more than one hundred years before that. These roots are usually traced to the publication, in 1765, of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which sent shock waves across the literary establishments of Europe. Percy had stumbled across an old manuscript, probably dating from about 1650, which contained a series of old ballads. Compared to the standard poetry of the time, they were a major blast of fresh air, and their publication started a fashion for heroic themes and direct language which lasted for decades.
Scottish editors were already moving in this direction, and following the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s seminal Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), a group of Scottish collectors, including William Motherwell, James Maidment, George Kinloch and Robert Jamieson, published editions of ballads, many of which were noted down from ‘the mouths of the people’. The collectors’ motives were a combination of literary and nationalist, and one incidental effect of this early start was the notion, which still persists to this day, that the ballad tradition in the British Isles was primarily Scottish.
In England, there were also stirrings of interest in the ‘songs of the people’, although it was at this stage confined to isolated individuals. The working-class poet John Clare (1793–1864) deliberately noted down his parents’ songs and used them in his poetry, while John Bell (1783–1864) demonstrated his interest in all things north-eastern by gathering local songs, published as Rhymes of the Northern Bards (1812). A strong interest in musical antiquarianism was also developing, which is reflected in Davies Gilbert’s Some Ancient Christmas Carols (1822) and William Sandys’s Christmas Carols: Ancient and Modern (1833). But the doyen of musical antiquarians was William Chappell, whose major work, The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time (1859), trawled through the history of music and assigned tunes to particular periods.
These writers used some material from ‘traditional’ sources, but this was not their primary concern, and they were more comfortable with older books and manuscripts than with real singers. This was about to change, albeit rather slowly.
In 1846 William J. Thoms wrote to the periodical the Athenaeum and proposed a new word, ‘folk-lore’, to describe the tales, beliefs, customs, songs and dances of the common people, which had previously been subsumed under the clumsy title ‘popular antiquities’. He thus gave a name to a body of material, and the discipline which would soon develop to collect and study it. In the same year James Henry Dixon put together his Ancient Poems for the Percy Society, and in 1847 the Revd John Broadwood produced, as a private venture, the first collection gathered entirely from ‘the people’: Old English Songs as now Sung by the Peasantry of the Weald of Surrey and Sussex (1847). More or less independent of this growing musical activity, a group of literary scholars with a specific interest in ballads were following in Percy’s footsteps. This movement found its apogee in the publication of Francis J. Child’s seminal English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98). The 305 items included by Child rapidly became the accepted canon for ballad study, and we still refer to these as ‘Child ballads’. He not only printed several early texts of each ballad, but also provided extensive comparative and historical notes on an international scale.
From the 1870s onwards, a number of individuals, including William Alexander Barrett, M. H. Mason, Sabine Baring-Gould, Lucy Broadwood (John Broadwood’s niece) and Frank Kidson, all became interested in the history of vernacular music, but the key development was that in addition to finding songs in old manuscripts and books they began to collect them from living singers. Working in different parts of the country, these enthusiasts gradually came into contact with each other and began to formulate the theoretical framework which eventually turned their personal interests into a crusade, and the Folk-Song Society was formed in 1898. The society pledged to collect and publish folk songs, and after a few initial years without much sense of direction, it hit its stride in 1904. In the previous year, two of the leading lights of the next phase of the Folk-Song Revival, Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, had collected their first songs and Sharp, in particular, with his flair for publicity and public controversy, rapidly brought folk music to the attention of the wider musical world and the general public.
So began the golden age of folk-song collecting: Janet Blunt, George Butterworth, Clive Carey, George Gardiner, Anne Gilchrist, Alice Gillington, Percy Grainger, Henry Hammond, Percy Merrick and others joined those already in the field, and between them amassed the major collections on which we still draw for our basic knowledge of the subject. Many of these are represented in this book.
What they found was a large repertoire of songs and styles of singing which were largely unknown to the ‘educated’ classes, and which had apparently existed in the mouths of the rural working people for generations. This ‘folk’ music had inherent qualities which, they thought, had been lost in both the more sophisticated art music and the raucous popular music of the time, and was therefore valuable enough to be rescued before it passed into oblivion. This notion of the solid old-world roots of the tradition led them to be highly selective in their collecting. They avidly sought out what they thought was old and genuine, and rejected anything which smacked of the modern and commercial world. Apparently unaware that the tradition had always been continuously reinforced and invigorated by infusions of ‘new’ material, they chose not to document the whole picture of vernacular song. They gathered an extremely rich harvest of material, for which we should be eternally grateful, but if only they had spread their net a little wider we would have a far better understanding of traditional song than the important but relatively narrow part which they chose to recognize.
One key characteristic of this new wave of enthusiasts was that they were primarily musicians, enamoured mainly with the tunes and less interested in the words of the songs. Nor were they interested in the social context in which the songs existed. They collected mainly from elderly people (because folk song was believed to be dying out), and in rural areas. For Sharp and Vaughan Williams, and several of the others, the real reason for collecting folk songs was nothing less than the revitalization of English music in general, and to this end, Sharp successfully lobbied the national education authorities to include ‘folk’ songs and dances in the curriculum of state schools.
For a time, Sharp and his colleagues were successful in getting folk music on the agenda in establishment musical circles, although whether or not they made any real difference to the musical tastes of the mass of the population is another question. It has to be said that there were some at the time who were not swept away with enthusiasm for the new folk-music movement and who thought it misguided and rather pointless, and there was a degree of public controversy in the musical press. Even more critical, however, was a more recent group of academics who began to argue, in the 1970s, that the main participants in the flurry of folk-song collecting before the First World War had systematically misrepresented the culture of the working people while pretending to champion it.
The folk-song collectors were drawn from such a narrow social background, it was argued, and their fieldwork so narrowly focused on a small section of working people’s experience, that their work constituted a distortion of the vernacular culture of the time. Worse still, they invented the whole category of ‘folk song’ to serve their own class-based agenda and deliberately appropriated the workers’ expressive culture for their own gain, in the same way as their parasitic class routinely expropriated the workers’ labour and money.
As is usually the case with writing that has a strong political agenda, the initial premise (in this case of class conflict and conspiracy) was couched in such a way as to make the conclusion seem not only reasonable but inevitable, while the dogma was allowed to distort the evidence, to the point of misrepresentation. While an investigation into the motives and methods of the early collectors was long overdue, and could have been a useful corrective to the previous uncritical acceptance of their role, the polemic that was produced has seriously warped the debate ever since, and it is time that it be relegated to a brief historiographical footnote concerned with the follies of the era, and replaced by a more balanced, accurate and nuanced perspective.
A few collectors did operate outside the ‘charmed circle’ of Folk-Song Society members. Alfred Williams (1877–1930), for example, was from a different mould. He had been a railway factory worker in Swindon, but later tried to survive by writing poetry, and books and articles about the Upper Thames region (Berkshire, Wiltshire and Oxfordshire). His Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames (1923) was the result of intensive collecting around 1918, and although it includes a slightly different range of material than the others, on the whole it pretty much confirms their findings.
When enthusiasts got the collecting bug they faced the problem of how to find suitable people to collect from, which was a particular puzzle for many of them as they often had little meaningful contact with the ‘working classes’ in their daily lives. Some started with family members and neighbours, and their servants often proved an unexpectedly useful source. One regular scenario was middle-class collectors remembering songs taught to them by their nannies or maids many years before.
Once the movement got under way, lectures, articles and newspaper appeals spread the word and people from far afield started writing in with their finds, and although these contributions are numerically insignificant and of variable quality, they often offer evidence from the areas in which the main collectors were not active. One regular method of contacting a community at a distance was to write to the local clergyman, who was often surprised to find that he had singers in his parish, let alone good ones. A visit to the local pub frequently provided good contacts, and workhouses were also particularly fruitful places to find elderly singers. Some collectors, like Cecil Sharp, regularly visited people in their homes or even asked likely-looking passers-by in country lanes, while others, like Grainger and Broadwood, based themselves at a friend’s house and invited singers to come there for collecting sessions. Each method had its advantages and drawbacks, and, however much we might wish they had done some things differently, was simply the best that could be done under the circumstances. Song collecting in that period was an arduous business and took a great deal of time, energy and expense.
Before the first decade of the twentieth century there was no option but to note down the songs with pencil and paper, and this was not as easy as it sounds. Not only were the tunes themselves unusual and difficult to the classically trained ear, but the performers were often elderly, out of practice and shy about singing to gentlefolk. It took an extraordinary level of musical skill to transcribe the songs well, and many of the enthusiasts, such as Sabine Baring-Gould and George B. Gardiner, felt they were not good enough and took along colleagues to take down the tunes. This had its advantages, as it was much more efficient for one person to note down the words while the other struggled to get the tune right, but it was sometimes difficult to find someone sufficiently skilled and sympathetic to undertake the work. Many trained musicians found unadulterated traditional singing very hard to take.
One of the advantages of being involved in a network is that expertise can be shared, and there was a great deal of correspondence between those in the field – often routed through Lucy Broadwood in her capacity as editor of the Folk-Song Society’s journal – and the leading collectors, who commented on each other’s work (not always completely amicably) and offered practical advice and assistance. Cecil Sharp, for example, edited the music for later editions of Baring-Gould’s Songs of the West and sharpened up the musical side of Lady Gomme’s publications of singing games. Ralph Vaughan Williams, too, made trips to note down the tunes of some of Ella M. Leather’s Herefordshire singers and also helped to transcribe tunes from phonograph cylinders made by other collectors.
The phonograph could have revolutionized the collecting experience in England because in theory it gave people who lacked the skills to note down a tune in live performance the opportunity to capture a song and notate it at their leisure, or find someone else who could do so. Collectors in other countries, most notably Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartok in Hungary, were already using it to document their folk traditions. It is not clear how far the English collectors were aware of developments abroad, but the new method met with only limited support over here. It has been argued that the main stumbling block was that the leading collectors were already set in their ways and rejected the phonograph as it threatened their hard-won position as gatekeepers in the folk-song world, but this is a parody of the truth. Certainly, many of them were sceptical about its use as the sole, or prime, collecting method, and valid objections were made on various grounds, including the perceived technical limitations of the media, the fear that it made the singers nervous and therefore falsified the record, and that its bulk and fragility made it difficult to transport and use, except in a highly controlled environment.
Nevertheless, the Folk-Song Society bought a machine in 1907 for use by members, and several of the leading collectors, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, George B. Gardiner, Cecil Sharp and Lucy Broadwood, experimented with the new technology, but with mixed results. The one collector who really took to the new machine, however, was Percy Grainger, and he became a strong advocate of its usefulness both in the field and in the study. He made numerous recordings in 1906 and 1908, mostly of his Lincolnshire singers, and maintained that the ability to play a performance over and over again, if necessary at a slower speed, gave him the opportunity to really get under the skin of the way a tune was sung; he produced detailed and complicated transcriptions, which baffled all but the most expert of his colleagues but which he claimed were more ‘scientific’ than those noted purely by ear. On the basis of this work he began to make claims about folk tunes that did not always agree with those of his more experienced colleagues.
It was this ‘scientific’ dissection of performances and his conclusions which caused other collectors to question his approach rather than the use of the phonograph per se. Cecil Sharp, for example, put forward a number of arguments in a detailed letter to Grainger, published by Michael Yates in 1982, in which he argues that the collector’s job is not to document the minutiae of a performance but to get to the essence of the tune. Sharp goes on to make some very revealing remarks about his distinction between the tune itself and the singer’s performance of it:
No doubt it is much easier to note down the ‘great or slight rhythmical irregularities ever present in traditional solo-singing’ from a phonogram than from a singer. The question is, is this worth doing at all? The majority of these rhythmical minutiae have nothing to do with the song itself, but only with the artistic presentation of it. The difficulty, which is perpetually confronting the collector, is to decide which of these aberrations he should record and which he should omit, in other words to settle when a rhythmical irregularity belongs to the song itself and when it is merely a personal idiosyncrasy, or arises from some mechanical cause, the taking of breath, fatigue, clumsy vocalisation, hesitation due to the forgetfulness of the words, and so on.
Grainger’s mercurial attention soon moved elsewhere and he did no more collecting in England after 1909, but many of his recordings, and a few made by others, have fortunately survived. Some can be heard on the British Library’s Archival Sound Recording website, and they are rightly considered precious evidence of what traditional singers sounded like over one hundred years ago.
After the First World War, when the collecting boom was largely over, the phonograph was rapidly eclipsed in general use by the gramophone, which for all its advantages did not have the same portable recording applications. So there was little follow-up to these promising early experiments with sound recording, and apart from the visiting American collector James Madison Carpenter, no other collectors seem to have made fieldwork sound recordings in England till the 1940s. A few people were still noting songs up and down the country, such as E. J. Moeran, Francis Collinson and H. H. Albino, but their efforts were relatively small scale. The Folk-Song Society amalgamated with the English Folk Dance Society in 1932, to form the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), and the prevailing opinion in the society was that there were no more folk songs to collect. But they were wrong. In the late 1930s there were signs of a renewed interest in folk-song collecting, and during the war there was an increased awareness (much of it government-sponsored) of ‘the people’ and their daily lives and concerns. The dramatic shift to the left in national politics, which resulted in the Labour Party’s landslide victory in 1945, was another important indicator of a newly confident working-class sensibility. The seeds of a new interest in folk music were being sown, which blossomed into a full-blown Revival movement over the next two decades.
Beginnings of the Second Folk-Song Revival
For some years a small group of people, usually jazz fans, had been seeking out records of American blues and folk music, but the market for such material began to expand rapidly and in 1954 resulted in the skiffle boom, which swept like wildfire across the country. It seemed as if every male teenager in the land was singing Leadbelly songs and bashing out chords on a guitar or thumping a tea-chest bass. It did not last long, until around 1957, but it introduced the youth of the nation to the guitar, and many skifflers graduated to become folk fans.
As for traditional folk songs, the popular radio programme Country Magazine had started to feature them in 1942, usually sung by trained singers, although not all listeners appreciated the move: ‘Can’t you put a stop to those awful songs, doesn’t the producer know that countrymen don’t sing?’ wrote one (Dillon (1949), p. 135). But in general the songs were widely appreciated, and largely as a result of the public interest aroused, the BBC launched its highly successful ‘Folk Song and Dialect’ collecting project, which ran from 1952 until 1957. Peter Kennedy, Seamus Ennis, Bob Copper and others went round the country toting newly invented portable tape-recorders and amassing a remarkable archive of field recordings of speech and song. The BBC also continued using folk songs in its programmes, and some, such as the As I Roved Out series, used field recordings to present folk songs sung by genuine traditional singers.
Meanwhile, left-wing activists such as Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd had begun using folk song in their writing and their radio programmes, but it took an American, Alan Lomax, to suggest the deliberate founding of a Folk Revival in Britain, and the idea spread very quickly. Folk clubs sprang up all over the country, records and specialist magazines started to appear, and a group of semi-professional performers soon developed, who toured and were paid (very little) for their appearances. But there was a very strong do-it-yourself, nobody-gets-paid ethos in the Revival, and one of the worst things which could be said in some quarters was that so-and-so performer had ‘sold out’ or ‘gone commercial’. For a while in the 1960s the commercial pop music industry did indeed take an interest in the folk boom, and some of the more accessible acts became household names and had hit records. This, too, did not last, but it had a significant impact, forcing the Revival further away from its roots in pre-war folk music.
Within the folk movement there were many different styles, tastes and fashions, and it is not our brief here to examine them all. One of the most important early divisions was between ‘contemporary’ and ‘traditional’, however, and the latter camp included those who eagerly sought out earlier books and recordings from which to draw their repertoire and inspiration. Many genuine traditional singers of the previous generation found themselves a new audience to sing to, and several made LPs for specialist folk labels. A significant new wave of collecting took place – seventy years after Sharp and his colleagues had pronounced folk song dead – and thousands more recordings were added to the national collection. The huge expansion of the higher education sector in the 1960s brought with it courses that included ‘folk’ topics, and for the first time real academic research in the subject was possible.
But it was the development of the Folk-Song Revival which ushered in the problems of definition that bedevil us today. For more than half a century, nobody had really questioned the received notions of folk music as laid down by the Sharp generation, although this was mainly because nobody seriously examined the question at all. But once the Revival took hold, the notion of ‘folk’ came under pressure from several directions and it soon collapsed under the strain.
First came the left-wing Revivalists, who argued that urban and industrial workers had just as much right to be considered ‘folk’ as their country cousins, and that their songs should be included in the genre – even those that were still being written. They also believed that folk song could be used by the workers in the fight against oppression, and they consequently accentuated the potential social protest aspect of folk music.
Other Revivalists soon realized that if the earlier definitions were valid then folk music must have died out with the fading of the unlettered peasantry and that they themselves could therefore never be ‘folk’. But they were desperate for the status and security that roots can offer, so they started to turn the definition of folk music on its head, and to argue that rather than being a relatively conservative, backward-looking genre of long roots and slow adaptation, folk must be relevant to the times and should therefore change rapidly with them if necessary. The first result was to include singer-songwriters in the definition, and when the semi-commercial ‘scene’ developed, in which fashions came and went, the Revival took another step away from the old tradition. As young musicians moved on to other styles, as is in their nature, they still kept the media description of ‘folk’, at least for a while. The result was that the word ‘folk’ expanded to include people whose act once used to have some connection with the old folk songs, however tenuous, even if it did not any more. It is no exaggeration to say that performances which were in effect the opposite to what was previously described as ‘folk’ were now given that same label.
The post-war Revival was also primarily youth-based. It was young people who provided both the rank and file of the movement and the up-and-coming artists, and even those who had no overt political agenda often still appreciated the genre precisely because it was noncommercial, democratic and vaguely counter-cultural. The movement was also, at first, based heavily on American influences – most notably in the use of guitars and the incorporation into the folk fold of protest songs and singer-songwriters. When the commercial music industry got involved it started labelling anything vaguely acoustic as ‘folk’, the elastic word stretched further and further.
The breaking point was reached when the Marxist academics of the 1970s and 1980s, already mentioned as leading the attack against the collectors, pointedly destroyed earlier notions of a ‘folk’ or peasant class, and declared the whole notion of ‘folk song’ to be a fake anyway.
So we are left with a term that not only covers too many disparate forms of music to be of much use but is intellectually untenable. One strategy is to retreat into the anodyne and in response to the question, ‘Is that a folk song?’ to reply, ‘Well, I never heard a horse sing it’; but that is hardly helpful. Another is to do what we are doing in this book and to assert that we are not concerned with the Revival or what came after it, or whether what happens now is ‘folk’ or not. We are only concerned with understanding and presenting what went on in former times, and that is plenty to keep us interested and busy.
Aspects of Tradition: Singers and Songs
We can now turn, with some relief, to an investigation of songs and singing in the period with which we are concerned. Our account will necessarily be impressionistic and somewhat superficial, but it is designed as an overview rather than an in-depth analysis, and we sincerely hope that it will stimulate further enquiry.
Although most of the pioneer collectors were not particularly interested in documenting all aspects of traditional song, we can go some considerable way to understanding the manner in which folk songs functioned within the community and how and when they were performed, at least during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Social and contextual evidence exists in a variety of sources but nobody yet seems to have gathered it together properly, although Roy Palmer’s books go a long way in this direction (see the Bibliography).
Sabine Baring-Gould and Alfred Williams were two collectors who gave us pen portraits of their singers, plus some valuable information on how they learnt their songs and where they sang them. But the real gems are often to be found outside the folk-song literature. So, for example, there are many books on contemporary rural life which include valuable information about singing practices, although we do have to make allowances for the ‘local colour’ and notions of quaint rusticity with which they are often suffused. A great deal of information can be gleaned from memoirs and autobiographies, and works of popular social history such as Flora Thompson’s incomparable Lark Rise to Candleford (1939–43). Some singers, such as Henry Burstow and Bob Copper, wrote their own accounts, and interviews with post-war singers have added a great deal of contextual information. Local newspaper reports of events, biographies of local characters, and so on, are well worth investigation, and even novels, plays and reports of court cases can be sifted for clues.
Similarly, there is no shortage of material on urban traditions, although never as much as we would like. Henry Mayhew’s London Labour (1861) tells us a great deal about ballad singers and sellers, while Tavern Singing in Early Victorian London, edited by Lawrence Senelick (1997), includes the diary of Charles Rice, a semi-professional singer of comic songs. And in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), for example, tangential details are given of the Harmonic Meetings at the local public house after the distressing occurrence of spontaneous human combustion. There are also numerous publications of the ‘low life in London’ type, which are the equivalent of the books on rural life already mentioned.
It is a bit misleading to speak of a ‘local singing tradition’, because there were semi-distinct groups within each community which had their own traditions. Thus, in a village, there might be differences between young and old people, men and women, those with different occupations, church and chapel, and so on, in addition to social class. But there would also be overlaps and occasions when they came together.
Songs could originate anywhere – from within the community or, more commonly, outside. For a ‘pop’ song to become ‘folk’, however, it needed to escape from the professional and commercial sphere and become amateur and vernacular, and it had to last long enough in the public ‘voice’ to be transmitted informally from person to person, and down the generations. But a folk song is not simply a pop song which has endured, because the song could have entered the folk tradition from another angle (for example, church music) or have been composed within the local folk tradition. What appears to have happened commonly is that young people picked up the latest songs, while (temporarily at least) rejecting those of the older generation as old-fashioned. There is evidence from Mayhew, for example, of youngsters deliberately buying and collecting the latest songsters from ballad sellers, and an elderly informant in the 1970s told me that in his youth he and his mates used to visit a local music hall to learn the new songs being performed there. Each of them learnt particular lines and they put the song together afterwards. In the nineteenth century, at least, in each successive generation, it seems that the young people’s songs were sufficiently different from the norm for the older generation to be wary of them, but sufficiently similar to be incorporated into the ‘local tradition’ as the young singers got older. At the same time as introducing their ‘new’ songs (that is, new to the community), the younger people were being regularly exposed to the older repertoire and absorbing it, even if they did not realize it.
The point here is that ‘new’ and ‘old’ had to be capable of amalgamation, and the contexts for performance had to be shared between the generations so that cross-generational influences could take place. The polarization of ‘youth’ and ‘adult’ culture, in both content and performance venue, is one of the reasons for the death of the old folk-song style.
It stands to reason that a song with similar characteristics to songs already in the tradition has more chance of being adopted than one perceived to be too ‘foreign’. So, for example, if it has a tune that is amenable to unaccompanied singing and words that are readily understandable, it is more likely to catch on and be accepted. A case in point here is the craze for ‘blackface minstrelsy’, which swept the country in the 1840s and remained popular for decades. The songs in these shows were catchy, singable and constructed on similar lines to traditional songs, and young people especially took to them enthusiastically. A number of minstrel songs stayed in the traditional repertoire for generations.
It is clear from the experience of the earlier collectors and later evidence that there was a marked difference between members of the same community when it came to songs and singing. Some people could not or did not sing, while the majority knew a handful of songs. But a small minority had dozens or even hundreds. In the case of the latter it was usually because they had taken a particular interest in the subject and gone out of their way to learn more – investing a certain amount of their personality in being known as a singer. Harry Cox (1885–1971) from Norfolk and Henry Burstow (1826–1916) from Sussex are examples of singers who went to considerable lengths to increase their repertoire. Others, such as Bob Copper (1915–2004) from Sussex, simply had prolonged exposure to a strong singing experience, whether through parents or other family members or in the workplace, and picked up songs almost by osmosis.
We know that some singers deliberately sought out songs that they fancied. Harry Cox, for example, stated that he would walk to another village and pay someone sixpence to sing a song that he was after, while others plied potential sources with drink to get them to sing. But many singers reported that they learnt their songs simply by hearing them over and over again – in the pub every Saturday, or in the home whenever family members thought fit to sing.
It is also clear that there is often a big difference between performers’ active and passive repertoires. The former category contains the items which a singer regards as his or her own and which will be sung when the opportunity arises, but the passive repertoire will include songs known but not usually performed – either because they belong to another person, do not appeal sufficiently or are considered incomplete. In most cases the passive repertoire will also include a whole host of ditties, catches, fragments, rhymes, toasts and other flotsam and jetsam of a life of oral tradition.
But attitudes can change over time, and many collectors have come across people who, as they have grown older, have started to take more of an interest in the old songs, and have deliberately tried to recall those that their mother or father sang, or were popular in the barracks or factory at some point in their lives. The Folk-Song Revival also caused a fair amount of ‘re-remembering’. Collectors started visiting older singers – many of whom had not sung for years – and stimulated them with their interest and questions. Those who then became involved in the Revival, by singing in folk clubs and at festivals, had an incentive to resurrect half-forgotten songs or even to learn new ones.
We also know that it was common practice for people to ‘own’ particular songs. These were songs for which they were so well known that no one else in the community would dream of singing them in their presence, even though they knew them perfectly well.
People sang in all kinds of places and contexts, and there was probably no situation in which people did not sing at one time or another – even funerals – but certain milieux seem to have been particularly conducive to song. The local pub is the obvious place to look for social music, and there is strong evidence that this was one of the primary locations for singing in urban as well as rural areas. In many cases it would happen on a Friday or Saturday night, but singing could break out at any time or on special occasions, provided, of course, that the landlord or landlady was amenable to such goings-on.
Most communities had more than one pub, and particular locations often acquired a name in the locality for being good ‘singing pubs’, to which those who liked to perform or listen would naturally gravitate. In many cases there were local rules covering singing sessions, with a recognized chairman who called for ‘order’, and even rules about who would sing and when. On the whole this kind of pub singing was a male province, as in many communities there was strong disapproval of women visiting pubs on a regular basis. Nevertheless, Ginette Dunn’s research into Suffolk traditions around the turn of the twentieth century has shown that while some women would go to the local pub only on special occasions, others went regularly but usually sat in a different room from the men. They too had a strong singing tradition, but it was quite separate from the men’s, and is less well documented.
The home was probably the most important singing environment for most women, who sang to themselves while doing the daily chores, to amuse, quieten or instruct the children, and with the whole family in the evenings and at weekends. Many children absorbed the local repertoire and singing style from hearing it constantly around the house long before they met it in other social settings. In many households, hymn singing was a particularly important part of family life.
There were also a number of special occasions within the family and the community when singing was expected – weddings, Christmas parties, harvest-home gatherings, for example – and at any time locals might organize their own ‘concert party’ or talent show. Whenever people went on trips, whether in the carrier’s cart or a motor ‘charabanc’, singing was a regular part of the fun of the day. Many people belonged to local social clubs, whose monthly or yearly meetings nearly always included singing sessions, while musical enthusiasts within the community might well form a glee club or a minstrel troupe.
People also sang regularly at the workplace, whether on the farm or in the factory. If people were together, and other factors did not prevent it (for example deafening machinery), singing was one way to pass the time. This was particularly likely if the tasks were skilled but sedentary, such as hand lace-making and straw-work, or if the workers lived in – on farms, ships or in army barracks. But others sang precisely because they were alone during much of the day – plough-boys and shepherds, for example.
Local fairs, revels, wakes, and so on – the name changes with the locality – were very important social events and often one of the few times in the year when young rural workers could mix with the opposite sex unsupervised by families or employers. A holiday atmosphere prevailed, and there was always plenty of eating and drinking, dancing and singing, as well as the chance to buy the latest broadside from a ballad seller.
No community was completely isolated from outside musical influence. Ballad singers and itinerant pedlars have already been mentioned, but a village could be visited by a German band or other itinerant group, and there were also professional travelling concert parties and theatre companies who would hire a barn or other space for a show. Many people would make trips to nearby towns to attend concerts or music halls, and outside influence would also operate through the singing in church or chapel, and as taught in the local school. These would all be based on different conventions and involve different repertoires. Children at school would not be taught to sing like their parents, or to perform the same songs their uncles sang every Saturday night after a few pints, and each individual chose which musical path to follow. But it is probably true to say that except in families with marked musical tastes, or strict religious principles, the local vernacular singing tradition formed the bedrock of most people’s everyday musical experience.
It is easy to romanticize the world of folk song and to claim its deep psychological value as the glue which held communities together before society fractured into isolated pursuits like watching TV, but there is some truth in the idea that singing and playing gave people a communal experience which we nowadays appear to lack. It is not simply that in previous generations amusements had to be self-made and singing cost nothing, but that there was often a generalized reverence for things which had stood the test of time, and a comfort in knowing where you stood in the community and what to expect. Obviously, there would be some in the community who hated all this ‘old’ stuff, who craved novelty and found the weight of tradition stifling, or who simply wanted a better class of music, and these people opted out of the traditional activities and found other outlets. Religious people were often encouraged to eschew worldly songs and music, for example, but many people cheerfully straddled two or more spheres. You could sing in the church choir as well as in the pub, play the melodeon for local step-dancing as well as trumpet in a brass band, and ring the church bells on a Sunday.
Decline and Fall
The founders of the Folk-Song Society and the individuals who answered their call to get out into the field and ‘collect’ songs claimed that folk singing had been in decline for some time and that the songs would be lost if swift action were not taken. They were convinced that the elderly people of the time were the last generation from which genuine folk songs could be obtained, and many of them had trouble remembering songs which they said had gone out of fashion years before. The collectors were right about the decay of the tradition, of course, but they got the timescale wrong, and folk song turned out to be tougher than they had bargained for. Many of the singers recorded by post-Second World War fieldworkers were children, or not even born, when Sharp and his colleagues were active.
Modern enthusiasts often find it difficult to come to grips with folk song being declared dead, and, as discussed earlier, sometimes attempt to circumvent the diagnosis by redefining what is meant by the term ‘folk song’; although those who define ‘folk’ in terms of performance and context within communities rather than simply by repertoire are more willing to accept the verdict, however harsh it may sound. But if ‘folk song’, in the old sense, is dead, who killed it? What was it that broke down? Was there one trigger or several? All the evidence points in one direction: ‘folk song’ flourished in a certain type of social context, and they declined and died together.
Not only is the term ‘folk song’ annoyingly ambiguous, but the other terms used in this discussion are similarly vague, including the word ‘tradition’, which we have already employed frequently as both adjective and noun and will do so again. In the present context, the phrase ‘the tradition’ is a useful shorthand term for the bundle of things which are pertinent to folk song within a community, and it is the identification of these things that will help us deconstruct the internal workings of what we are arguing is a particular form of vocal expression, different from other forms.
The key point has been made several times already; it is not simply the repertoire – the songs themselves – which matter, but also the place of singing within the community. ‘The tradition’ encompasses the singers themselves and their attitudes to singing; the audience’s attitudes; the songs (words and tunes), what they say and where they come from; the performance styles; venues and social contexts; who attends and participates; local rules (for example, who sings when, song ownership, and so on), and the frequency of singing opportunities. There is also the question of the degree of openness – how often songs from outside are introduced and whether they are welcomed.
To oversimplify: in a ‘healthy’ tradition there is plenty of opportunity to perform and an incentive to do so. With much singing going on, there is opportunity to learn new songs and to further imbibe stylistic features which come with repeated hearing. Singing has (usually) a positive social function and good, or effective, singers gain credit for being able performers.
In a ‘declining’ tradition there are fewer opportunities to perform and to learn, and little incentive. Singers get out of the habit and out of practice. In practical terms, songs become lost or fragmented because people who know only part of a song cannot easily find someone else who knows it to help them out. A ‘tipping point’ is reached when folk songs become disliked and disowned by significant parts of the community and are actively discouraged. Even in Sharp’s day many elderly singers were worried that the collectors were asking them to sing to make fun of their ‘old-fashioned’ songs.
The early collectors already regarded the urban population as too corrupted by modern influences to be worth considering, and they believed that rural areas were going the same way. They blamed the increased sophistication of the rural population on general social changes such as education, literacy, travel, the rise of commercial mass entertainment and the fact that it was penetrating to every corner of the land. When singers’ views are recorded, which is not very often, they usually blame young people for not being interested in the ‘old ways’.
The fact of decline is hardly to be disputed, but there is a problem with the timescales involved, and the whole process now looks a lot messier than it seemed in Edwardian times. Modern researchers looking back at social change and its effect on the ‘old ways’ often focus on the period just before and after the First World War as a time of major upheaval, and this period is seen as the end of a golden age of rural community, contentment and innocence. But if the early collectors’ assessment of the health of the tradition was correct, it was already in terminal decline well before the turn of the twentieth century. The twentieth-century acceleration of urbanization, mass entertainment and universal education may have exacerbated the situation but can hardly have caused it.
Flora Thompson’s perceptive description of pub-singing at the Wagon and Horses in her village on the Northamptonshire – Oxford-shire borders in the 1880s highlights the changes in the air at the time and is worth quoting in extenso, although those interested should read the whole piece:
While the talking was going on, the few younger men, ‘boy-chaps’, as they were called until they were married, would not have taken a great part in it. Had they shown any inclination to do so they would have been checked, for the age of youthful dominance was still to come; and as the women used to say, ‘The old cocks don’t like it when the young cocks begin to crow’. But, when singing began they came into their own, for they represented the novel.
They usually had first innings with such songs of the day as had percolated so far, ‘Over the Garden Wall’, with its many parodies, ‘Tommy Make Room for Your Uncle’, ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’, and other ‘comic’ or ‘sentimental’ songs of the day. The most popular of these would have arrived complete with tune from the outer world; others, culled from the penny song-book they most of them carried, would have a tune fitted to them by the singer. They had good lusty voices and bawled them out with spirit. There were no crooners in those days.
The men of middle age inclined more to long and usually mournful stories in verses, of thwarted lovers, children buried in snowdrifts, dead maidens, and motherless homes. Sometimes they would vary these with songs of a high moral tone, such as ‘Waste not, Want not’ …
But this dolorous singing was not allowed to continue long.
‘Now, then, all together, boys,’ someone would shout, and the company would revert to old favourites. Of these, one was ‘The Barleymow’… Another favourite for singing in chorus was ‘King Arthur’… Then Lukey, the only bachelor of mature age in the hamlet, would oblige with ‘My Feyther’s a Hedger and Ditcher’…
But, always, sooner or later, came the cry ‘Let’s give the old ’uns a turn. Here you, Master Price, how about “It was My Father’s Custom” or “Lord Lovell” or summat of that sort as has stood the testing o’ time?’ and Master Price would rise from his corner of the settle, using the stick he called his ‘third leg’ to support his bent figure as he sang …
[Eventually] someone would say ‘What’s old Master Tuffrey up to, over in his corner there? Ain’t heard him strike up tonight’, and there would be calls for old David’s ‘Outlandish Knight’, not because they particularly wanted to hear it – indeed they had heard it so often they all knew it by heart – but because, as they said, ‘Poor old feller be eighty-three. Let ’un sing while he can.’ So David would have his turn. He only knew the one ballad, and that, he said, he had heard his own grandfather sing it. Probably a long chain of grandfathers had sung it; but David was fated to be the last of them. It was out of date, even then, and only tolerated on account of his age …
Songs and singers have all gone, and in their places the wireless blares out variety and swing music, or informs the company in cultured tones of what is happening in China or Spain …
Writing in 1943, Flora can be forgiven a touch of nostalgia, but her description rings true for the period and is confirmed by other sources. Of particular interest are the stratification by age, the different types of repertoire, the respect for the old alongside the introduction of the new, and even the printed songbooks, which had largely replaced the broadsides and supplied some of that new material. But also of note is the fact that young and old were still sharing the same performance space, taking their part in the same social event and doing the same thing: singing.
Neither collectors nor performers in the early twentieth century could have foreseen the other major change which would revolutionize the world of song and music: the development of sound recording and broadcast media. Slowly but surely as the century progressed, records and radio removed the face-to-face element of music-making, brought a much higher degree of homogeneity, and introduced a commercial imperative which emphasized professionalism and the constant need for novelty rather than the slow change of local tradition. It is worth remembering that before the invention of the phonograph, if you wanted to hear a song you had to be in the presence of the performer.
The new recording technology was not totally inimical to ‘folk’ singing. The new sound media also gave people access to songs which they may never have encountered otherwise, and therefore helped to spread them around. Albert Richardson’s recordings of ‘The Old Sow’ and ‘Buttercup Joe’, for example, issued in 1928, were extremely influential and his versions turned up in singers’ repertoires all over the country many years later. In Ireland, Scotland and, particularly, in America, records in vernacular styles were deliberately made and marketed, and certainly supplied local singers with new ways to use their skills. And in America, because radio was local and often drew on local talent, many traditional performers had an opportunity to turn at least semi-professional.
But again the decline was not as fast as many people predicted. Pub sessions roughly similar to those described by Flora Thompson were still found in the 1930s (see, for example, H. Harman’s Sketches of the Bucks Countryside (1934)) and even after the Second World War, as the remarkable film of an evening at The Ship in Blaxhall, Suffolk, in 1952 (recently reissued on the British Film Institute’s DVD set Here’s a Health to the Barley Mow) amply demonstrates. And, as mentioned earlier, post-war collectors gathered a harvest of hundreds of old songs still being sung in the old style.
Whether or not the Folk Revival, or rather Revivals, continue a tradition or have started a new one is open to debate, and, as already stated, depends largely on your definition of ‘folk’. In this sense, its very elasticity can be either a curse or a blessing.
Editors and Performers
Following the original definition of folk song, however flawed, the key feature the folk-song researcher will look for is whether the song in question was ‘collected’ from actual singers or culled from another book, from a commercial or professional source (that is, trained musicians or professional singers) or even simply made up. Without this information it is impossible to be sure how ‘authentic’ the information is.
The next litmus test is the quality of the evidence presented: whether the collector or previous editor/author has faithfully reported what he or she found. It is notoriously difficult to represent a sung performance in standard music notation, and it is even surprisingly hard to fully represent a vernacular text in normal writing, but at the least the editor should make the effort.
These problems are well understood and can be compensated for, but the real difficulty is when editors have ‘improved’ the music by correcting notes or intervals to conform with what they think it should be, or have altered the words to scan better or to change the meaning. In the past, folk songs published by both musicians and poets had routinely been subject to these cavalier editorial attitudes, and it is not always easy to tell how trustworthy a particular editor is, although whether the reader cared or not depended very much on what they wanted from the material.
Performers, of course, are under no such obligations as regards fidelity to source, although in the folk world there have often been strong notions of being grounded in ‘tradition’, which at least implies a degree of authenticity. Many performers were happy with previous editorial practices, because they usually enhanced the modern ‘per-formability’ of the songs, while researchers deplored them and consigned the perpetrators to that corner of hell reserved for untrustworthy editors.
This divergence of expectation between scholars and performers has resulted in a regular irritating misunderstanding on the question of accuracy and alteration in folk music. One argument runs that because folk songs change in transmission and performance it is therefore perfectly acceptable for collectors and editors to alter the songs they are presenting to their public. They are simply another link in the chain of transmission. By the same token, some performers assume that editors who are pernickety in preserving the exact details of their informants’ texts and performances are being ‘purist’ (a favourite pejorative word in this debate) and are attempting to straitjacket future performance by dictating exact fidelity to the source.
The fact of the matter is that editors’ and performers’ needs may overlap, but are very different. It is the editor’s task to present the data as accurately and honestly as possible, so that future users have the choice whether to change things or not – although if you are simply looking for a good song, it matters little how it has come to you, and questions of historical accuracy and authenticity will probably come a poor second to notions of singability. But if you wish to say, to yourself or others, ‘This is how it was sung in Sussex in 1907,’ then you need to be confident that the editor has not interpolated verses from Scotland, changed the notes to suit a personal notion of how songs should sound, or omitted verses because they offended some notion of propriety. The question is whether or not you can trust the editor, but the rest is up to you.
Broadsides and Street Literature
Something needs to be said about broadsides and other street literature, because they are intimately connected with the history of folk song and are mentioned frequently in the Notes in this book. ‘Street literature’ is the usual term for cheap printed material which poured from the back-street presses of jobbing printers from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, and was designed to entertain and inform the masses. The genre includes broadsides (single sheets printed on one side), chapbooks (made by printing a large sheet and folding it into a small booklet), prints (woodcuts and engravings) and other forms of cheap printed material.
Songs constituted an important part of street literature, but there was also a huge range of prose pieces which described local crimes and scandals, offered last dying speeches purportedly written by condemned criminals, told amazing stories of monstrous births, sea serpents and other wonders, or related traditional stories like ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, or the exploits of Robin Hood or Dick Turpin, while a great number were devoted to the interpretation of dreams, how to tell the future, and so on.
Street literature was available in various ways. Broadsides were sold in city streets and at rural markets and fairs by itinerant vendors who sang the songs to attract attention and teach the tunes, as well as by static ‘stationers’ who pinned them up on street walls or railings for their customers to peruse. They were also included in the packs of itinerant pedlars and were stocked by shops which specialized in toys and other cheap sundries, and sold retail and wholesale by the printers themselves; the better class of broadside was also sold in book shops. We know that sheets on popular subjects sold in their hundreds of thousands, and, judging by the number of printers who specialized in their production, there must have been a steady and lucrative market.
Cheap printed material came in many types, shapes and sizes, but for songs the standard forms were the broadside and the chapbook, or garland. The most common broadside pattern in the nineteenth century was a quarto (10 in. x 8 in.) sheet, printed on one side of flimsy paper. The words were printed in two columns; occasionally there would be one long song but more commonly two songs were printed side by side, and a sheet could be cut in half to make two separate ‘slip songs’. The sheet would often be decorated with one or two woodcuts, which were used again and again and frequently had little connection with the song.
The quality of the printing varied enormously. Some were carefully and professionally typeset, but the majority were rough and ready, and many were very crude indeed, on poor-quality paper, with letters missing, inserted in the wrong place or upside down. Larger sheets were also available, with lots more songs, and there was a special annual trade in large, lavishly illustrated sheets of Christmas carols. Some of the song chapbooks were issued in series with a generic title (for example, A Garland of New Songs), presumably to encourage people to collect them. Even within street literature, there were fashions brought about by changes in taste and/or developments in paper-making and printing technologies. Eighteenth-century broadsides were usually larger than nineteenth-century sheets, and songs could therefore be much longer. Chapbooks of songs proliferated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but gradually gave way to more substantial ‘songsters’, which had more pages and were more professionally produced.
Many local printers produced a few broadsides from time to time as a sideline, but there were some who specialized in this type of material and the most prolific advertised that they held over 4,000 or more different ballads in stock, offering items at prices ranging from a halfpenny to sixpence. London was the most important place for broadside printing, but there were significant producers in Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool and other regional centres, as well as in Scotland and Ireland.
The main broadside market seems to have faded away by the 1880s, but a few printers specialized in song sheets well into the twentieth century. These catered for customers who were nostalgic for old songs as well as those who wanted the latest music-hall or comic songs.
It is now clear that the vast majority of the songs which were collected as folk songs had previously appeared on broadsides and in chapbooks, and we know that many people learnt their new songs in this way. This does not negate the theory of an oral tradition, because the person who bought a broadside and learned a song may then have sung it to dozens of other people, who picked it up by ear. But it does make the idea of a purely oral tradition untenable, except perhaps in regard to the tunes. Although sheet music for many songs was available, this was an expensive format and required the ability to read music. Most people therefore learnt the tune aurally even if they got the words from a printed source.
Most modern researchers accept the role played by print in the folksong tradition, although there is still debate about the relative proportions of print/oral influence, and what this means to our overall notion of folk song as an identifiable category of music. Even if we think that broadsides had a minimal effect on the song tradition, they are still essential for historical research. Street literature is rarely dated, but it often includes datable clues, such as printers’ names and addresses, which enable us to get a handle on how old particular songs are. What also seems clear is that some, perhaps most, folk songs started life as songs written specifically for broadside production, and were probably written by poorly paid urban versifiers usually referred to as ‘broadside hacks’.
The Folk Song Index and The Broadside Index
These have been mentioned several times in the Introduction and therefore need some explanation. The Folk Song Index is an online database which seeks to list all the English-language folk songs ever collected in the English-speaking world. A very tall order, of course, and it will always be a work-in-progress, but a good start has been made and it already contains 180,000 references. The most complete section is that devoted to material collected in England, and nearly all the major publications and unpublished collections have already been included. Each entry includes the song title, first line, performer’s name, collector’s name and date and place of collection, and whether the text or tune is available. As each element is fully searchable and sortable, it is relatively easy to isolate songs from a particular singer or geographical location, or all the versions of a particular song. A numbering system allows users to find versions of a song, even if they appear under different titles.
The Broadside Index simply gives details of songs which appeared on broadsides, chapbooks, songsters and in other cheap literature up to about 1920. It is very useful in its own right as a finding aid for popular songs, and for the history of street literature, but is particularly valuable for tracing the history of songs which appear in The Folk Song Index. Both indexes are freely available on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website: www.efdss.org.
The Folk Song Index underpins much of the commentary of the present book in two significant ways. Firstly, the ‘Roud number’ quoted when song titles are mentioned is not only a way of identifying the song and distinguishing it from others with the same name, but also offers the interested reader the key to other publications and collections. And secondly, the gathering of large quantities of data provides the present-day researcher with opportunities which were not previously available. The quantitive evidence supplied by the Index is the basis of many of the judgements and statements made in the present notes – such as ‘This song was widely collected in England but not often in Scotland.’ Nevertheless, as the Index is still growing, such statements must always be taken as at least partly provisional.
Steve Roud