I learned these words at school, a poem written by WJ Turner, about a boy entranced by Eldorado. I stored them in my memory, hoping that one day I too would find a place that took me by the hand. I didn't have to travel too far: I would find it in the South Downs.
It wasn't until some time in the 1970s that my love affair with the Downs began. For one of my birthdays, a 30-something one, I had requested that Ashley, Polly, Rob and I should go for a walk on the Downs; they were starting to call to me. I didn't know them well at all then. I have photographs – but no actual memory – of having been taken there as a toddler for outings and picnics with Mum and Dad, and Granny and Grandad, those weekends before the War when Dad had use of his employer's car.
When Ashley and I lived in Etchingham, we'd go for walks locally, across the fields and through the woods, and cycle along quiet lanes. But on this birthday walk, on a hot July day, we set off with a picnic but no map. We went by train to Eastbourne, caught the bus up to Beachy Head, then onto the Downs. We walked long stretches until the children grew hot and tired, and at last, late in the afternoon, we had wound our way down to the tiny village of Litlington. We sat outside The Plough and Harrow drinking lemonade and munching crisps, trying to work out how we'd get home. We were in luck; a man at the next table, overhearing our plight, offered us a lift to Polegate. From there, we could catch a train to St Leonards, and change for the Etchingham line. Quite a while later, after we'd stopped for celebratory birthday fish and chips in Polegate, we made our way home, the sleepy children drowsing on the train. At last we were walking down Borders Lane to the cottage. Although it was evening, the heat was increasing, the air filled with electricity. Ahead of us, huge dark thunder clouds were amassing; we quickened our steps on very tired legs, and got through the door of Red Rose just as the storm broke. There were great flashes of lightning; we counted the seconds to see how far away the storm was, and then before we'd got to three, there was an enormous, sharp clap of thunder, and our telephone shattered into many pieces. The lightning had come down the line. It was a memorable birthday!
I had loved being up there on those long stretches of Downland in such clear light, breathing air off the sea, wondering what was over the next hill brow topped by huge white clouds. I loved the feel of the springy turf beneath my feet, and the chalk and flints kicking up on the paths. And all the while, the sound of skylarks, those elusive songsters who you could hear, but rarely see, so high in the sky were they.
I felt too that those long, serene lines of the Downs were there in the songs of Sussex, whose anthemic tunes flow with such strength and grace. And the hawthorns, their bark covered in rusty lichen, blown and shaped by the prevailing south-westerly winds, were like the songs, shaped by the many voices that have sung them, changing gradually over the years.
Folk music reflects the landscape it's written in. Certainly it is true that the land necessarily once governed the occupation of its inhabitants, whether as shepherds, farm labourers, carters, fishermen, poachers, blacksmiths, or in times of war, soldiers and sailors, pressed away to join the armies and navies – all of which gave rise to hundreds of folk songs.
Many of the stories of the songs take place in a familiar landscape, opening with the lines ‘As I roved out one May morning’, setting the scene for whatever story is going to unfold and preparing the listener for an encounter. There were love songs and ballads, songs about work – carting, harvesting, shepherding and sheep shearing, poaching and hunting; others celebrated various high points of the year – old May carols, Harvest Homes, Christmas and New Year carols and Wassails.
Hundreds of these were sung across Sussex, and noted down by collectors from the mid-1850s up to the 1970s. The earlier collections are in books; the more recent ones are, happily, on sound recordings, allowing us to hear the authentic voices of the singers themselves, their personalities and their accents.
Using even a tiny selection of these genuine folk songs, a path can be traced across Sussex. We can set off on the journey well over a hundred years back with two songs whose melodies have become part of our national consciousness. The first was sung by Harriet and her husband Peter Verral, an agricultural labourer who was born in Lewes in 1854, although when Ralph Vaughan Williams met them in 1904 on one of his folk-song hunting expeditions, they were living in Monksgate, near Horsham. One of their songs, ‘Our Captain Calls’, dates from the Napoleonic Wars, and its tune so impressed Vaughan Williams that he later set the John Bunyan hymn ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’ to it. Next to the title in the New English Hymnal which Vaughan Williams edited are the words ‘Tune – Monksgate’.
The second collected song was ‘The Banks of Green Willow’, which Mr and Mrs Cranstone sang to the composer George Butterworth, in Billingshurst in 1907; he later used it as inspiration for his orchestral idyll of the same name.
Also living in Horsham was the remarkable Henry Burstow, a shoemaker and a radical free-thinker, who knew over 400 songs by heart. His songs were noted down by Lucy Broadwood and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of his most beautiful songs is ‘Gilderoy’, which dates back to the late seventeenth century.
In the 1970s Mabs Hall and her son Gordon lived in Horsham, next door to Henry Burstow's home on Spencers Road. Their repertoire of songs and, especially, ballads seemed boundless – as was Gordon's voice. Gordon invariably lit up a cigarette when he started a song, and judged the length of a ballad not by its number of verses, but by how many cigarettes he got through while singing it!
In Lodsworth the songs of another fine Sussex singer, Henry Hills, were noted down by W Percy Merrick in 1899. His ‘A Sailor's Life’ was recorded by Fairport Convention on their 1969 album Unhalfbricking. Then in Lower Beeding, ‘All Things Are Quite Silent’ was noted down from Ted Baines by Vaughan Williams in 1904. This story of a man snatched away from his sweetheart by a press-gang is one of the loveliest and most poignant songs ever found in England.
But from now on we'll stay with material recorded as recently as the 1950s by Peter Kennedy and Bob Copper and broadcast on Country Magazine (see Chapter 5). With these sound recordings we could get a full sense of the character of the singers.
The singers, of course, knew more than one song, but I'll choose just one from each, and we start at Fittleworth in November 1954, where Bob Copper recorded a beautiful ‘Deep in Love’ from a housewife, Mrs Gladys Stone. And it was there that Bob also met George Attrill, a road maintenance worker, as he was cutting back grass at the roadside with a swop-hook. He sang ‘The Broken-Down Gentleman’ to Bob that same evening in his cottage, as they sat sipping George's homemade parsnip wine.
On to Copthorne, home to George ‘Pop’ Maynard. His dignity and the sweetness of his nature were clearly there in his singing which, in spite of his old age when he was recorded, was still beautiful and had a rare grace. His ‘Polly on the Shore’, recorded by Peter Kennedy in George's cottage in 1955, dates from the Napoleonic Wars, and gives a graphic and bloody account of a sea-battle, while at the same time being a love song with a noble tune. It would touch any heart.
Heading away towards Balcombe, where in 1963 Peter recorded Harry Upton singing ‘Canadee-i-o’, the song that was always sung on the last day of shearing in the barn known as Toad's Hall at Blatchington. The song had been handed down from Harry's father Frank, who was a shepherd all his life. His sister Mrs Wheatland told how they sang all around the villages at Christmas and added: “We're living in the same place now, Blatchington, but instead of it being the country place it was, it's now a large council estate, and ours was the last farm cottage to be pulled down. Before that, it was all farming land, a thousand acres of cornfields and sheep grazing”.
A few miles away, and nearly ten years earlier, Bob had met Lily Cook, in September 1954 in North Chailey; in her kitchen she sang ‘The Lark in the Morning’. It was his very first recording for the BBC, and he felt it was a most reassuring start to his journey.
A couple of months later, down towards the coast at Hammerpot, near Angmering, Bob found Jim Swain, a carter, and recorded ‘The Banks of Sweet Mossen’, which Jim had learned from an old shepherd at Felpham. It was unique – no other version of this song had ever been heard before or since.
Heading along the coast to Hastings, in November 1954 Bob recorded Ned Adams, the cox’n of the Hastings lifeboat, singing ‘The Bold Princess Royal’. ‘When Ned sang,’ wrote Bob, ‘you could smell the sea’. From Noah Gillette, a retired, illiterate fisherman in St Leonards, Bob heard the remarkable ballad about Napoleon's demise ‘The Bonny Bunch of Roses’. Noah had learned it by heart from his grandmother, who Bob reckoned was alive at the time that the ballad was written and sold on the streets following Napoleon's death, creating a direct link to an historic event.
Inland now to East Dean, where in 1952 Peter Kennedy met the blacksmith Luther Hills who sang ‘The Foggy Dew’, the recording made in Luther's smithy. And not far from there, in November 1952, Peter came across a group of gypsies camped on a grass verge outside the village of Laughton. He recorded many songs from them, but the jewel, the most precious, was ‘Come Father, Build Me A Boat’, sung in true gypsy style by six-year-old Sheila Smith. With this recording, this little girl memorably and so sweetly sang her way into the history of English folk song.
A trip to Brighton now, where gypsy Mary Ann Haynes had settled, and earned a living as a flower seller. Mike Yates recorded her in 1974, and one of her songs, ‘The Female Drummer’, mirrors to a great extent the life of Phoebe Hessel, a female soldier who lived out the end of her life in Regency Brighton on a pension of half a guinea a week from the Prince Regent himself. She is buried there in St Nicholas Churchyard, her memorial stone cared for by admirers. Oh yes, and there's a Brighton bus named after her.
And finally, to the Copper Family of Rottingdean. When we get to them and their unique centuries-long history of singing, I am persuaded that the landscape shapes the melodies. The Copper tunes sound like anthems; they are beautiful, and with such a noble strength and sweep that they do truly resemble the Downs and make you feel grounded, safe and home. ‘The Bold Fisherman’ has all these qualities, and opens with the line
Of the many wonderful singers that the Sussex landscape inspired, three in particular have remained heroes to me.
George Maynard was England's finest English traditional singer (matched only by Harry Cox of Norfolk). His large repertoire was crammed with wonderful songs that, of course, he knew by heart. Perhaps the best-known was ‘Polly on the Shore’. Martin Carthy included it on his 1969 album Prince Heathen (1969), I sang it on Love, Death & the Lady (1970), and surprisingly, the comedian Stewart Lee (author of this book's introduction) sings it, too. When I first heard Stewart sing it live, I was quite overcome and on my feet applauding.
George was a countryman through and through. Born on Old Christmas Day (7 January) in 1872, he left school at the age of twelve and was apprenticed to his father, earning his living woodcutting, hedging and ditching. He'd travel to harvesting and hop-picking, with the occasional bit of defiantly unapologetic poaching when times were hard, to feed his wife and six children.
‘Poaching?’ he said. ‘I should go out again if I had my time over again before I should let my family go short of anything. I'd rode my old penny-farthing over to Langshot, came home and had my tea… And I heard the wind a-blowing hard, and there was Arthur and Nelly wanted a pair of shoes bad, so I said to my wife, “After I've had my tea, Polly, I'll go out and see if I can catch a few rabbits, to see if I can earn they youngsters a pair of shoes.” I hold any man a coward who would not poach to feed his family.’
George was also a marbles champion, and captain of The Copthorne Spitfires, beating their rivals The Tinsley Green Tigers at the marbles tournament which still takes place on Good Friday at Tinsley Green in Sussex. He was given his nickname Pop because he was such a good marbles popper.
The most graceful and gentle of singers, he sang naturally in his local Sussex style, with integrity and dignity. You can hear him on Ye Subjects of England (Topic LP 1976) and on various CDs of the Topic series The Voice of the People.
‘Down by the Seaside’ is another song of his, most likely also dating from the Napoleonic Wars. With its beautiful tune and a touch of sweet gentility in the use of the word ‘opera-glass’ (very rarely heard in English folk song!), this tender song is another of my favourites from George's extensive repertoire, and can be heard on my album Adieu to Old England (Topic 1974).
As I was a-walking down by the seaside
I gazed on a young damsel, put her in surprise
I stepp-ed up to her, these words I did say
O no, O no this young damsel replied
I'm seeking for my true love who's gone far and wide
As she was lamenting and could not prevail
She looked through her opera-glass and saw the ships sail
As she was a-standing all on the same spot
The news it came to her, her true love was shot
Now since it's been so I will go to some grove
Bob Copper was the outstanding figure in the recent history of Southern English traditional music. An author and poet, an artist, a raconteur and broadcaster, and parish historian, as well as a singer, he was employed by the BBC throughout the 1950s to work in Sussex and Hampshire, recording what remained of traditional song in the field, making a remarkable collection. In his book Songs and Southern Breezes, he told of that experience with humour, compassion and understanding. Like Alan Lomax, he wrote with a romantic passion, but always truthfully. And both men had a great respect, admiration and affection for the singers.
I first met Bob when I was a teenager in Hastings. I listened to the BBC's Home Service broadcasts of the programmes Country Magazine and As I Roved Out on the radio, or wireless as we knew it, and often a folk song would be played, sometimes sung by a trained singer with pianoforte accompaniment, which didn't sound quite right to me, or an unaccompanied song from a genuine traditional singer, which I felt much happier with. I had also seen a film Night Club Girl at the Gaiety cinema in Hastings, the story of a girl from the mountains of Tennessee taken to New York by a talent scout to sing in a night club. (There was love interest as well, and she did seem to have a lot of pretty frocks at her disposal – something I envied in those post-war days of austerity and rationing – you had even needed clothing coupons.)
So I thought I'd like to be a folk singer, and at 15 years old wrote to the BBC to let them know! By some miracle – and I truly believe the arc of my life would have been so different if this had not happened – the letter was passed to Bob Copper. One day, there was a knock on the door at 117 Athelstan Road, and there stood Bob Copper. He was in Hastings recording songs from fishermen in the Old Town. Naïvely, my sister Dolly and I tried to impress him with songs and a Scottish ballad we'd learned off the wireless – which I'm sure we tried to sing in a Scots accent, and of course that wasn't what he was looking or hoping for. But it was a first meeting with a man who was to influence me for the rest of my life. I learned songs from the Copper Family repertoire – songs that had been handed down in their family for many generations, forming the canon of the folk culture of Southern England – and which helped root me in it.
I became good friends with Bob over the years. My favourite personal memory of him? We had taken a walk together over the Downs from Peacehaven to Rodmell, to have lunch with the blacksmith there. Bob was the ideal walking companion, talking so knowledgeably about the landscape as we walked through it, loving the very air we breathed, and aware of so much that was there to see. At one point, he stopped and stood still, waiting until a shiny black beetle that was crawling across the chalk path in front of us had reached the other side safely. Unfailingly kind, this great but modest man was someone you always felt better after seeing. And these lines from an old Sussex gypsy carol sum up what I believe we owe Bob Copper:
Had we as many years to live as there are blades of grass
We could never do for him all he has done for us
Bob & Ron Copper: Traditional Songs from Rottingdean (Fledgling 3097)
I first became aware of the name Henry Burstow in the 1970s when I was in the library at Cecil Sharp House. While looking in a Journal of The English Folk-Song Society of 1909, I came across a song that straightaway intrigued me when I saw that, of the eight lines of verse three, six had been substituted by asterisks. The song was ‘Gilderoy’ and it had been noted down from the singing of Henry Burstow of Horsham by Lucy Broadwood, the daughter of a wealthy Surrey family, who collected folk songs widely in Sussex and Surrey around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lucy had added a note: ‘Mr Burstow sang me one verse of Gilderoy and sent me the whole ballad a year later. I have omitted one stanza.’ Obviously it was considered too frank for the delicate, albeit hypocritical sensibilities of Edwardian England.
I was determined to find the missing words, and got permission to look in the Lucy Broadwood files. To my horror and anger, I found that they were locked away in a little side room, books and loose sheets of paper scattered on the floor, covered in dust and with every sign of being nibbled by mice. (This was symptomatic of the way The English Folk Dance and Song Society was at that time – dance was king, song was by and large neglected).
I hunted for ‘Gilderoy’, and found it with its complete words, and I also came across a letter written by Henry to Lucy in 1902, couched in such gentle and courteous terms that it quite broke my heart. It read:
I cannot tell you how surprised and pleased I was with the beautiful song book you kindly sent to me. I shall always prize it and think of you and the times when I came and sung to you. I wish I had sung the 400 I knew. I think perhaps their [sic] was some if you had heard you would have liked. I sung all of them to an old gentleman one Christmas. It took me a month. I use to sing to him every night.
I should have wrote and thanked you before, but I have been waiting. A Warnham singer promised to write the song for me. He said he knew the Americans has stole my truelove away. I will send it to you, if I get it.
I think the song book you so kindly presented to me a most beautiful got up work. What a lot of trouble and expense it must have been to you. I am so sorry I cannot read music. I should have learnt a great many more songs. I am very much oblige [sic] to you for The Rival. I will learn that has I know the tune. I whent [sic] to Dunsfold with the Rusper ringers a few years ago there is six rather small new bells.
I shall be very pleased with a copy of the paper with the songs when it is printed.
Thinking [sic] you very much again for the book and kind rememberance of me.
P.S. I only know about half dozen songs in the book you gave me.
I resolved to save the letter from the dust and the mice, and popped it into my handbag. Yes, I stole it. But I had also rescued it, and it was my most treasured possession right up until recently when I gave it back to The English Folk Dance and Song Society, handing it over to Malcolm Taylor, the librarian of The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. He put it into the safe with what I thought was rather indecent haste! I knew that it would now be taken proper care of, but I couldn't help feeling quite bereft.
Henry Burstow was born in Horsham in 1826, and lived there all his life, earning his living as a shoemaker. He lived through the reigns of four monarchs, George IV, William IV, Queen Victoria and Edward VII. He was well known locally as a church bell ringer, but he was much more than that; he was an atheist and a radical free-thinker. The story was told that he'd ring the bells at the Parish Church every Sunday, but, much to the annoyance of the Vicar, would never stay for the service. The Vicar collared him one Sunday and asked him why. Henry looked him full in the eye and replied, ‘I brings ’em in, I leaves it to you to drive them away again.’
When he was a boy of twelve he and his friend Bill Etheridge, (a lad from such a poor family that he was dressed in rags and was barefoot) walked all the way from Horsham to Pease Pottage – a distance of a few miles – to join the huge crowd that had gathered to see the young Queen Victoria pass by in her carriage on her way to Bognor Regis. The crowd sang the national anthem, but Henry remarked later that instead of God sending her victorious, it might be better if he sent the Horsham boys something to eat, and a pair of boots for Billy to wear.
Henry wrote his own account of his life and times in a book Reminiscences of a Horsham Shoemaker which can still be found.
And he would knots of ribbons wear
He pull-ed off his scarlet coat
He was beloved by the ladies so gay
Our dads and our mums they both did agree
And crowned with mirth and joy
He took me round the waist so small
And when he had done all a man could do
What a pity it is a man should hang
He had neither robbed a house nor land
And he stole neither horse nor deer
For he was beloved by the old and the young
Now Gilderoy, they've hung him high
And a funeral for him we shall have
With a sword and a buckler by my side
I'll guard my true love to his grave
For he was beloved by the young and the old
He was my sovereign heart's delight
My handsome bold young Gilderoy1
What is it in English folk song that holds me so, that gives me a sense of inhabiting the songs? Or is it that they inhabit me?
‘The Oxford Girl’ is such a one – perhaps the most extreme example: I learned it from Phoebe Smith, a gypsy, whose singing had command, power and nobility. It's a song about a brutal murder:
I fell in love with an Oxford girl,
She had a dark and a roving eye
That being established, he invites her out for a walk ‘through the fields and meadows gay’. So far, so idyllic, but then the story changes gear… almost as if its events happen on a whim… or in a trance.
I took a stick from out the hedge
I caught fast hold of her curly, curly locks
And I dragged her through the fields
Look how she go, look how she floats
It was sometimes on my mind as I walked through the fields at the back of Red Rose in Etchingham. It's almost as though the murder happens in a trance – there's a terrifying tenderness in the brutality – heightened by that use of the word ‘gently’. I felt that I understood the deed. I began to see corners of fields as seductive, beautiful but dangerous places where anything could happen, and in a curious way, I welcomed it. It was as though I had become the girl in the song. Such dark thoughts to have had, and indeed shaming ones, but they were there. I didn't normally view the Sussex countryside as dark and dangerous, quite the opposite. It was full of light and delight, the fresh sharp green scent of it in early spring; a place of beauty and safety; and it was home.
I've often felt that past generations of English singers are standing behind me when I sing, that I'm a conduit for them and their songs, a link in a mysterious chain, and that I'm responsible for maintaining their integrity. But where did this come from, this unbreakable hold on me? I think it's partly the age in which I was born, still in touch with and not too many years ahead of those singers, and partly the rural working-class family I was born into. And was it inherited memory that gave me recognition of the music? Or is that too fanciful? Most likely it's because of the songs and nursery rhymes that Granny and Grandad sang to us in their air-raid shelter, the songs we learned at school, the Playford tunes that we danced to, and the carols we sang at Christmas – those cadences and rhythms of the English tunes that I loved.
My first intimation of this recognition occurred when I was seven years old or so, at Primary School. We were learning a new song, a folk song, ‘Turpin Hero’, and as I sang it I thought – ‘that sounds a bit like ‘Greensleeves’’.2 ‘Turpin Hero’ had that same familiar ‘Englishness’ about it that I liked. Much later I'd recognise that same quality in the music of Henry Purcell, Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth; but I didn't find it there in Benjamin Britten's or Percy Grainger's arrangements of English folk songs, which had too many uncomfortable harmonies, and were generally sung by trained voices, losing their identity and making them quite unsuitable. And yet I had a reason to be grateful to Percy Grainger, as he'd collected one of my favourite songs in 1907 from George Gouldthorpe, a lime burner who had ended up in the Brigg Union Workhouse, Lincolnshire.3 And, incidentally, it was George Gouldthorpe who sang ‘Horkstow Grange’, with its chorus: ‘Pity them what see him suffer, Pity Poor Old Steeleye Span…’ thus providing the folk-rock group with its name.
The song was ‘Six Dukes Went A-Fishing’, an unlikely title for a noble and ancient song: it's another example of the seemingly miraculous mystery of the survival of songs and what they have to tell us. According to A. L. Lloyd, the best theory is that the corpse in the song was that of William de la Pole, first Duke of Suffolk, who was murdered in 1450, and his body thrown into the sea off Dover. (See Henry VI Part 2, Act 4).
And the one said to the other, these words I heard them say
It's the royal Duke of Grantham that the tide has washed away
And they took him up to London to the place where he was known
The song surges like an inexorable tide on a wide sandy beach, long waves creeping in, leaving their marks of foam on the sand before they retreat and ebb away. Its tune is beautiful, spare, and the song has that heart-breaking last line – ‘the royal Queen of Grantham went weeping away’. Can't you just picture her, grief-stricken, turning away from the cortege?
I wonder, too, as I do with so many songs, how it came to be on George Gouldthorpe's lips, and what journey it had taken over perhaps 500 years; it's remarkable that it was ever found at all. Its hold over singers even made it to the United States, a couple being noted in New England; and in the Southern Appalachians there are remnants of it attached to other old ballads such as ‘The Brown Girl’, sung to Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles in Callaway, Virginia, in 1918.
They are little ghosts of songs, holding on… refusing to be entirely forgotten.
But back to why ‘Englishness’ should be so important? And what is it? I wonder why my family had such a deep feeling for England as a country. They weren't wearing rose-coloured spectacles: their lives had never been easy, my grandparents’ especially had been harsh and unfair in so many ways. They loved England, but weren't ignorant of its dark history.
Consider my maternal grandparents, Frederick and Grace Ball. He was the head gardener on a small Sussex estate in Telham, just outside Battle, and she was the housewife raising their five children in a tiny isolated cottage surrounded by tall dark pines. She managed for five years without her husband, when he was sent as a soldier to India and Burma in 1916, not returning until 1920, and she nursed her family through the devastating flu epidemic of 1916. Her only relaxation and consolation was to read her beloved Dickens aloud to them in the evenings. In the final year of her husband's absence, the ‘Old Gal’, the owner of the estate, died; it was sold and with it went Grandad's job, but his family was allowed to stay in the cottage until his return. They then moved to Hastings where he'd found another gardening position. That lasted a few years, but came to a sudden end when one day he turned up at work to find that his employer had left, gone away for good without giving him notice or his final wages. So he took a job in a nursery, a bit of a come-down for him, but which had the advantage of it being just a short walk away from the home they had rented, 121 Athelstan Road. It had a small front garden full of Michaelmas daisies and California poppies in the autumn, and a long back garden where he grew fruit and vegetables to provide for his family throughout the year. Granny was happy to be away from the country at last and living in town, where she hoped her children would get a decent education. It must have been a bit of a sacrifice for Grandad though, as he loved the countryside, and had taken all his children as new-borns outside in his arms to show them the trees and the sky. To my mother the Sussex countryside was a refuge and a consolation during the war. My father celebrated it in the simple poems he wrote while serving in The Royal Artillery in WW2.
A country mazed by winding lanes
Her rolling Downs by Beachy Head
Where poets’ footsteps always tread
Her rivers, Arun, Rother, Ouse
Where fishing folk do sit and muse
Her ancient towns of Hastings, Rye
And Winchelsea; though times may try
Her farming men, so bronzed and lean
Work harder now, and times are lean
The countryside and the songs are as one to me; the safe-guarding of them equally important, both so vulnerable. Our beautiful landscape is seen by the avaricious as something to exploit, to concrete over and spoil, to drive unnecessary roads and railways through. It's often the same with our remarkable music, too, as people with very little understanding and knowledge of it seek to change its character. Contained in these songs are the lives and experiences of the people who sang them in the past, dismissed as peasants, often despised and neglected. Yet those same people were the carriers, knowing, by heart, hundreds of songs and ballads that have come down through generations, through centuries, bearing our musical, literary and social history; you might call it the archaeology of music.
In a way, a line was drawn when the collectors came along in Victorian and Edwardian times, and started noting down songs from ordinary people throughout the countryside. And of course, it didn't end there – collecting continued right through to the 1970s with the advantage of recording machines, giving a far more complete sound and understanding of the singer and the song. Thank heavens that they did, otherwise it all might have been lost.
There appears to be no subject that isn't sung about, and the songs themselves teem with incident of every sort. There are heroic deeds of bravery, acts of treachery, battles, sea-chases, true love so loyal it can survive incredible odds, lovers separated for seven long years (it's always seven) finding each other again, love that even returns from the grave; the dead can speak, although more often than not they plead with the living to stop mourning, to let them go, to let them rest. On the other hand there are careless false lovers, seductions, partings, adulteries; but the songs aren't solely about heartbreak and retribution, there are many erotic, saucy and frivolous sexual encounters too. There are the ballads that deal with the big taboo subjects: incest, infanticide, any number of murders, even cannibalism in the British Navy. Many are about wars, press-gangs sending men to ‘fight abroad for strangers’, transportation or execution. England's dark history imbues many such songs. They also tell of the everyday, drinking and gambling, ‘night rambling and courting’, poaching and hunting, working on the land or the sea. There are songs of witchcraft and magic, inexplicable but convincing happenings. And always that connection to the mystery of the seasons, those remarkable ancient turning-of-the-year carols, that can bring you to a standstill, taking you back in time while connecting you to the present.
One of the oldest songs that was still being sung in the field, albeit rarely, is ‘Death and The Lady’. One version was collected from a Mr Baker of Maidstone, Kent by Francis M Collison in 1946, yet it harks back centuries, perhaps even from when the Black Death was stalking the country. It puts me in mind of the gripping scene in Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film, The Seventh Seal, where a knight, newly returned from the Crusades, plays a long game of chess with Death on a lonely Scandinavian seashore. So many songs open with the words ‘As I walked out one morn in May’ that it is like the device ‘once upon a time’ that prefaces many fairy tales. On this walk you might encounter a sweetheart or a seducer, a soldier returning from fighting abroad for seven long and weary years, or serving on board ship. You might encounter the Devil, who you could outwit, or you might meet Death, who you couldn't.
As I walked out one morn in May
The birds did sing and the lambs did play
His hair was white, his beard was grey
His coat was of some myrtle shade
My name is Death cannot you see
Lords, Dukes and Ladies bow down to me
I'll give you gold and jewels rare
I'll give you costly robes to wear
Fair lady lay your robes aside
And not long after this fair maid died
Write on my tomb the lady cried
Here lies a poor distress-ed maid
Whom death now lately, whom death now lately hath betrayed4
Bessie Jones, a remarkable woman and singer living in St Simons, one of the beautiful Georgia Sea Islands, also sang of a conversation with Death which has remnants of the English version. It was one of many songs that Alan Lomax recorded on our 1959 field collecting trip in the American South.
You say ‘I am Death, no one can excel
I open the doors of Heaven and Hell’.
Well, I'm gonna fix your feet so you cannot walk
I'm gonna fix your tongue so you cannot talk
Close your eyes and you cannot see
You got to go and come with me
And do not take me at this stage
Vera Hall Ward of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, also sang her version to us.
There are so many fragments of songs and ballads with perhaps just a glimpse of the original story; sometimes I'm tempted to restore them by linking the words to more complete versions, but often I accept them just as they've come down to us. Some of the early collectors, mostly middle and upper-middle-class men and women, with the leisure and wherewithal to go out ‘in the field’, tried to explain such elusive things when they printed their ‘finds’ in the first Journals of the Folk-Song Society, formed in 1899.
In 1908 Francis Jekyll and George Butterworth noted down the song ‘Come All You Little Streamers’ from the singing of Ned Spooner, an inmate of the Workhouse in Midhurst, West Sussex. Of this charmingly muddled song, Anne Gilchrist wrote in the Journal of The Folk-Song Society in 1913: ‘I tried to give some faint idea of the strange and countless permutations of this kind of ballad… Clearing up some of the obscurities which have puzzled folk-song collectors.’ She felt that the song was in a ‘present woefully corrupt and incoherent state’.
O come all you little streamers wherever you may be
These are the finest flowers that ever my eyes did see
At the top all of the mountain where my love's castle stands
It's over-decked with ivory to the bottom of the strand
At the bottom of the mountain there runs a river clear
A ship from the Indies did once anchor there
So come all you little streamers that walks the meadows gay
And write unto my own true love wherever she may be
But for me, as a singer, it's delightful and perfect as it is with its utterly delicious last verse. That ‘woefully corrupt and incoherent state’ is its fascination and a good reason to sing it pretty much as it came from Ned Spooner. I'm sure he didn't puzzle over the obscurities, and neither do I, in fact I welcome them, trusting both the singer and the song.
It grieves and angers me that nowadays the term folk music has come to mean almost anything – a singer-songwriter, a pop star with a guitar or an accordion, as if that is its true definition. Anyone can claim to have written a ‘folk song’, completely ignorant of, or dismissing the fact that it's the long journey down through so many, many years that makes it the real thing, that essential handing-on by word of mouth by generations of singers.
I'm occasionally challenged by some people who maintain that folk song belongs to everyone (which indeed it does – if they want it) and therefore that anyone can write a folk song. I counter that argument by saying that a true folk song has undergone the ‘handing-on’ process. Of course, anyone can write a song, I'm perfectly happy with that (although not often happy with the outcome). What I object to is that they are denying the essential part played in it by those people who sang and handed those songs on to us, mostly people from the rural labouring classes who throughout their lives were exploited and despised, dismissed as worthless. I have always tried to redress that by naming the singer that I learned the song from, whether in person or from a book or a field recording. Then a second argument is flung up that somebody must have written that song in the first place, so why can't a song that was written last week be, or become a folk song, say in a hundred years. There's no proper answer to that since none of us will be around in a hundred years to prove it. In any case, music isn't handed down by word of mouth nowadays – it's sold to us by a worldwide music industry that all too often trivialises us, and the music, while influencing our tastes and preferences.
But having said that, there are songs that we do know were written at a certain time, many with the sole purpose of celebrating noteworthy events, such as ‘The Murder of Maria Marten’. That ballad, in particular, was sold in its thousands as a printed broadside at the execution of the murderer William Corder at Bury St Edmunds in 1828. It passed into the oral tradition and was widely sung, and still is; it doesn't have an author's name. There is another song, ‘The Poor Murdered Woman’ or ‘The Leatherhead Common Murder’, written less than a decade later, that has also passed into the song tradition, and this time we know who wrote it. It is one of the finest, most moving ballads about an actual event.
While the Surrey Union foxhounds were out hunting on Saturday last at Leatherhead Common, a most extraordinary and horrid circumstance occurred, which at present is involved in great mystery. About 12 o’clock as the huntsmen were beating about for a fox, the hounds suddenly made a dead set at a clump of bushes on the Common. As no fox made his appearance, the huntsmen whipped the dogs off, but they still returned to the bushes, and smelling all around, would not leave.
Supposing there was a fox which would not break cover, the huntsmen beat the bushes, and in doing so, to their astonishment and horror, discovered the body of a woman in a state of decomposition.
Various rumours are afloat, some stating that the unfortunate woman was the wife of a travelling tinker.
Peter Bullock, alias Williams, a travelling tinker and knife-grinder, was charged with the murder. A young girl who was on the tramp with a couple, said that while sheltering in a barn with them, she heard Bullock talking about a woman who he called ‘his dear Nancy’. He lamented her death, and upbraided himself with having been her murderer, and said he did the deed with a hammer after leaving a public house where they'd had a quarrel. He dragged her body to a wood, and left it there. (From Surrey Constabulary History.)
The woman's remains were buried on 15 January 1834 in an unmarked pauper's grave in Leatherhead churchyard. A local bricklayer, a Mr Fairs, was moved to write a song telling of her murder; all the details are so accurate it's almost reportage. It was sung locally, even some sixty years after the event, when Lucy Broadwood, our collector in Sussex and Surrey, was given it in 1897, by the Rev Charles Shebbeare, to whom it had been sung by Mr Forster, a young farm labourer, it being one of his favourite songs. Lucy printed it in her collection English Traditional Songs and Carols (1908) and in one of the early Journals of the Folk-Song Society where she noted ‘its fine Dorian tune’, but unfortunately made a reference to its ‘doggerel words’.
In 1935 it was included again in a book called English Folk Song and Dance, but only ‘as an example’ in the words of the editor, Iolo A Williams, as ‘a song of poor poetical quality’.
They were both wrong. The words have such a strength of feeling, compassion and tenderness for this ‘poor murdered woman’. With its beautiful tune it is a noble song.
It was still being sung in the 1960s when I first heard it sung by Peter Wood at the Fighting Cocks in Kingston, Surrey, and it continues right up to the present day, taken up by several of the younger generation of singers. In 2013, Paul James and Simon Houlihan produced a programme for FolkRadio at the same time as an exhibition was mounted at the Leatherhead Museum by local historian Rev Alun Roberts, meticulously detailing the event, and using my recording of the song from No Roses (1971). Alun and I agreed that we would name the poor murdered woman, ‘dear Nancy.’
It was Hankey the Squire as I've heard men say
Who rode out a-hunting on one Saturday
About eight o’clock boys, our dogs they throwed off
On Leatherhead Common, and that was the spot
They whipped their dogs off and they kept them away
For I do think it proper she should have fair play
They mounted their horses and they rode off the ground
They rode to the village and alarmed it all around
The next Sunday morning, about twelve o’clock
Some hundreds of people to the spot they did flock
She was took off the Common and down to some inn
And the man that has kept it his name is John Simms
Her coffin was brought; in it she was laid
And took to the churchyard that is called Leatherhead
So now I'll conclude and I'll finish my song
And those that have done it shall find themselves wrong