The colector alfred williams throws an interesting light on all of this, here is part quote from mike yates
Williams, not being trained as a musician, had, as Frank Purslow mentioned above, noted down all manner of songs, many of which were not 'folk songs' in the eyes of the Folk Song Society members. But - and this is actually the beauty of his collection - in doing so, Williams has shown us more or less just what singers were actually singing in parts of the Thames Valley during the period 1914-6. For example, Williams appears to be unique in telling us that singers were singing glees - part-songs, sung unaccompanied, which were originally based on 17th century madrigals. They were extremly popular during the period 1750-1850, but were thought to have more or less disappeared after that date. In Folk Songs of the Upper Thames we find this note attached to the songs Here's a Health to all Good Lasses and Come, ye Friends of a Social Life.

Glees were usually sung by those having slightly superior tastes in music; that is, by those above the average intelligence among the villagers, or by such as had been trained at some time or other to play on an instrument, it may have been a fiddle or cornet in the local band, or in the choir on Sundays at the church.

It should, though, perhaps be mentioned here that while folk songs were once well-known, they were not necessesarily easy to find.

A countryman never sings to a stranger. First win his heart and confidence before you can expect a song from him. And this requires time and effort on your part. That is why, as I have said, the folk-songs escape attention.

Cecil Sharp, who had once lived and worked in Australia, felt the same when he said that English folk songs were like the duck-billed platypus, an animal that was seldom seen, even when one was standing on a river bank directly above an underground nest. I think Sharp would also have agreed with Williams when the latter spoke about the difficulties of persuading people to sing, athough I doubt if Sharp would have approved of Williams having to "buy" a song or two.

I have sometimes been forced to spend several hours of manoeuvring with people before I succeeded in tapping their store of folk-songs. And sometimes I have had to entreat, and almost to implore; but I have never once absolutely failed to obtain a song from an individual after I had learnt that he was possessed of some. Once or twice I have had to buy a song outright, as though it had been a saucepan or a kettle... The great majority, however, when once you have crept into favour with them, give you the songs freely, with apologies for their rudeness. They are surprised that you should discover yourself to be interested in such a thing as a country ballad, and I have more than once been reminded that "only fools and fiddlers learn old songs".

Nor should it be forgotten that Williams, like Cecil Sharp and the other collectors, was often having to tease the songs from elderly singers, many of whom were in their nineties when Williams called to note their songs. One 94-year-old singer told how, as a young man, he had worked in the fields alongside a former soldier who had fought at Waterloo. There is also the touching story of one man, aged 99, singing to Williams only a few hours before his death.

Who, then, were these simple rustics? Luckily, Alfred Williams has told us quite a bit about the men and women who sang for him. There was, for example, Elijah 'Gramp' Iles of Inglesham who, mistaking Williams for the new village curate, quoted a short passage from the scriptures on their first meeting.

In my perambulations of the Thames Valley I have met with fine old characters, but none of them were quite as distinct, original, and rich in memories as 'Gramp'. The songs he sang were all very old. Several of them he learnt from his grandfather, while only a lad: they must have been in the family for generations. Then there was Henry 'Wassail' Harvey of Cricklade who, at first, refused to sing to Williams. Once, when Williams called on the octogenarian, he found Harvey suffering from a cold, and some medicinal rum soon had the old man singing!

Daniel Morgan, a traveller and dealer, gave Williams a very rare text for the old ballad Bold Sir Rylas. Morgan lived in Bradon Woods:

(His) great-grandfather was a squire, and he disinherited his son and also attempted to shoot him, lying in wait for him for three days and nights with a loaded gun, because he courted a pretty gipsy girl. In spite of the squire's opposition, however, his son married the gipsy lass and left home to travel with his wife's kindred and earn his living by dealing, and attending the markets and fairs. Daniel Morgan... is a witty and vivacious man. He lives among the woods of Bradon, the relic of the once large forest of that name, in which the famous Fulke Fitzwarren is said to have defied the King at the time of the Baron's War. I have spent pleasant hours in the cottage, during the dark winter evenings, listening to the old man's songs, which he sang sitting on a low stool cutting out clothes-pegs from green withy, while his wife sat opposite making potato nets.

And there was Gabriel Zillard of Hannington.

Of Zillard it is said that he would unbutton his shirt-collar at six in the morning and sing for twelve or even eighteen hours, if necessary, with the perspiration streaming down his cheeks.

According to Williams, Zillard was not the only person with a large repertoire of songs.

It was common, years ago, during wet weather, when labour out of doors was at a standstill, for the rustics to assemble at the inns and have singing matches, in order to see - not which could sing best, but which could sing most.

There were usually two singers at such events, which could last for up to two days, each singer taking a full day to sing through his repertoire. And their repertoires would always be of old songs.

And I have never once known a rustic, or any one else accustomed to singing the old folk-songs, who would deign to learn any of the modern popular pieces. They speak of them with contempt, and feel insulted if you should ask them to sing one. "What! That stuff! That thing! Call that a zong! Ther's nothin' in't, maester. Ther's no sense ner meanin' to't, ner no harmony,"they will answer you.

When I was collecting folk songs many years later, I too often heard similar comments from the people who were giving me their songs. Many singers that I met clearly preferred the old songs to the sort of songs that they were hearing on their radios. I would also say that Williams was right when he spoke of the types of songs that his singers preferred to sing.

Different people sing different songs. I mean different types of songs. And that is natural. It is a matter of temperament...The songs of old Elijah Iles, of Inglesham, were gently humorous and witty, such as "The Carrion Crow and the Tailor", "Sweet Peggy", and "The Old Woman Drinking her Tea". The majority of the pieces sung by David Sawyer, the sheep-shearer of Ogbourne, were rather sentimental. William Warren, the South Marston thatcher, sang the romantic-historical kind, such as "Lord Bateman". Shadrach Haydon, the old shepherd of Hatford, preferred the strong and formal order. Thomas Smart, of Stratton St Margaret, would sing none but what were moral and helpful. Those of 'Wassail' Harvey, of Cricklade, were roughly hilarious, such as "How I Could Ride if I Had But a Horse", "Dick Turpin", "Jarvis the Coachman", and so on; and those of Mrs. Hancock of Blunsdon, were of the awful sort, i.e. dealing with tragedies, lovers, and blood, such as "Johnny, the Ship's Carpenter", "The Gamekeeper", and others.

Interestingly, according to Williams:

The women's songs were chiefly the sweetest of all... They were rarely sung by the males. The women might sing some of the men's pieces, but the men seldom sang those of the women. They appreciated their sweetness but they felt that the songs did not belong to them... Most of the men sang in the inns, and their pieces were consequently more or less publicly known, while the women's songs were sung over the cradle and might not often have been heard out of doors. I have never omitted an opportunity of searching for the women's songs, where I suspected any to exist, and I was never dissappointed with anything I obtained as a result of such inquiries. Examples of the kind and quality of songs sung by women are discovered in such pieces as "Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor", "Grandma's Advice", "The Seeds of Love", "Lord Lovel stood at his castle Gate", "If you will walk with me", "Cold blows the Winter's Wind", and so on.

So, where did these songs come from in the first place? And why were they disappearing? With the exception of a handful of locally composed songs, almost all the songs that Alfred Williams collected were known, in one version or another, throughout England, lowland Scotland and parts of Ireland. When we think of the word folk we tend to think of an oral tradition. But, in the case of folksongs, this is not quite right. For several hundred years the texts of songs, including what we now call folk songs, have been printed on single-sided sheets of paper called broadsides. Hundreds of printers throughout the country have issued these sheets and this was how the songs texts passed into the tradition. Alfred Williams was clearly aware of this tradition.

The songs were mainly obtained at fairs. These were attended by the ballad-singers, who stood in the marketplace and sang the new tunes and pieces, and at the same time sold the broadsides at a penny each. The most famous ballad-singers of the Thames Valley, in recent times, were a man and woman, who travelled together, and each of whom had but one eye. They sang at all the local fairs, and the man sold the sheets, frequently wetting his thumb with his lips to detach a sheet from the bundle and hand it to a customer in the midst of the singing.

But, Williams also wrote:

It must not be forgotten that very few of the agricultural labourers of a hundred years ago could read or write.

If the singers were illiterate, how then did the songs pass into the tradition? Well, as I said, thousands of these sheets were sold every week, so some labourers must have been able to read. Williams reports that many of his singers said that they could learn a song after only hearing it sung once or twice. Other Edwardian song collectors have also noted similar comments from their singers. So perhaps the songs were learnt from the broadsides by a few people and that others, hearing the songs sung, were able to quickly learn them.

But why were the old songs no longer being sung? Williams offers us a number of reasons.

The dearth, or, at any rate, the restricting of the fairs, and, consequently, of the opportunities of disseminating the ballad-sheets is one cause of its decline. The closing of many of the old village inns, the discontinuance of the harvest-home and other farm feasts. The suspension and decay of May games, morris dancing, church festivals, wassailing, and mumming are other obvious reasons.

Change to village life came in other ways, too.

Another factor was the advent of the church organ and the breaking up of the old village bands of musicians. That dealt a smashing blow at music in the villages. Previous to the arrival of the church organ, every little village and hamlet had its band, composed of the fiddle, bass viol, piccolo, clarionet (sic), cornet, the "horse's leg", and the trumpet or "serpent". They were played every Sunday in church. But they did not solely belong to the church. All the week they were free to be used for the entertainment of the people.

In fact, according to Williams, the entire structure of country life was being broken up.

Another reason for the disappearance of the folk-song is that the life and condition of things in the villages, and throughout the whole countryside, has vastly changed of late. Education has played its part. The instruction given to the children at village schools proved antagonistic to the old minstrelsy. Dialect and homely language were discountenanced. Teachers were imported from the towns, and they had little sympathy with village life and customs. The words and spirit of the songs were misunderstood, and the tunes were counted too simple. The construction of railways, the linking up of villages with other districts, and contact with large towns and cities had an immediate and permanent effect upon the minstrelsy of the countryside. Many of the village labourers migrated to the towns, or to the colonies, and most of them no longer cared for the old ballads, or were too busy occupied to remember them.

But, again according to Alfred Williams, one factor above all others was responsible for the disappearance of public singing. Singers were forbidden to sing in the village inns.

This was the most unkind and fatal repulse of all. It was chiefly brought about, I am told, not by any desire of the landlord, but by the harsh and strict supervision of the police. They practically forbade singing. The houses at which it was held i.e. those at which the poor labourers commonly gathered, were marked as disorderly places; the police looked upon song singing as a species of rowdyism.

And, finally, the songs could not compete with the rapid changes in entertainment that were spreading throughout the land. The gramophone and the cinema have about completed the work of destruction, and finally sealed the doom of the folk-song and ballad as they were commonly known.

No wonder Alfred Williams felt the urgent need to collect those songs that were still remembered by his elderly singers.

In 1915 Round About the Upper Thames was published in serialised form in the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard. This was the third of Williams's country prose books. The paper then asked Williams to submit some of the folk song texts that he had collected, so they too could be published in a similar fashion. He was offered three pence (1p) per printed song - not much when we realise that Williams would sometimes cycle up to 70 miles before collecting one song! In all, about 250 songs were printed in the paper and Williams pasted the cuttings onto cards, these becoming the draft for his book Folk Songs of the Upper Thames.

But it was not until 1922 and 1923 that Round About the Upper Thames and Folk Songs of the Upper Thames were to appear in book form. Williams had stopped collecting songs in 1916, when he joined the army, and it may be that ill health, together with the work involved in building Ranikhet, had prevented him from working on these two books.

Surprisingly, Folk Songs of the Upper Thames was not reviewed in the Journal of the Folk Song Society, although, in the 1945 Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (the continuation of the Folk Song Society's Journal) Frank Howes, the music critic of The Times and then a leading member of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, did provide a short review of Leonard Clark's biography of Williams, Alfred Williams, His Life and Work, which concluded with the following:

Williams did not add music to his varied accomplishments and the tunes find no place in his collection of folk-songs, but he was a true collector in that he tapped the oral tradition of rustic singers and as a student right outside the folk-song 'movement' his book (i.e. Folk Songs of the Upper Thames) has a special value for us. There is an unconfirmed suggestion that, following the publication of Folk Songs of the Upper Thames, the Folk Song Society offered to print the rest of the collection, but Williams refused help, apparently believing that the Society simply wished to put two or three choice songs into their collection. To my knowledge, the only extant letter to Williams from a member of the Folk Song Society is one from the Yorkshire folksong authority Frank Kidson, who argued with Williams that some of his collected songs were not really folk songs. It goes without saying that comments like that would not have been well received by a man like Alfred Williams!

A Different Drummer

Alfred Williams was a remarkable man, one who left us a unique legacy. It has been said on occasion that Williams felt himself to have been a failure, and, during his lifetime, he certainly did not receive anything like the praise that is now given to him. His beautifully written prose books tell of a way of life that is now long past. His song collection is of great value, and yet he was criticised by some members of the Folk Song Society, who failed to review his book Folk Songs of the Upper Thames in their Journal.

And it has only been after his death that his importance has been fully realised. Interestingly, his treatment by the Folk Song Society was similar, in some ways, to that given to Alice E Gillington, another 'outsider' song collector, who lived with gypsies in the New Forest and who collected and published many of their songs. Correspondence between Gillington and Lucy Broadwood shows that the latter did not think too highly of Miss Gillington's songs. Like Alfred Williams, Alice E Gillington was not a member of the Folk Song Society.

Much can be said about Alfred Williams's legacy and there is much to be thankful for. As Albert Mansbridge, the founder of the Worker's Education Association, once said, "England is greater to-day, because Alfred Williams lived a brief day in her life."

Acknowledgement
My thanks to Malcolm Taylor, Librarian of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London, for his help in the preparation of this essay.

References
Most of the quotations mentioned above can be found in the following works:
Baldwin, John R. Song in the Upper Thames Valley: 1966-1969 in Folk Music Journal Vol. 1. No. 5 (1969), pp. 315-349. The English Folk Dance and Song Society, London.
Clark, Leonard. Alfred Williams, His Life and Work Basil Blackwell, 1945. Reprinted, David and Charles, 1969.
Clissold, Ivor. 'Alfred Williams, Song Collector' in Folk Music Journal Vol. 1. No. 5 (1969), pp. 293-300. The English Folk Dance and Song Society, London.
Purslow, Frank. 'The Williams Manuscripts' in Folk Music Journal Vol. 1. No. 5 (1969), pp. 293-300. The English Folk Dance and Song Society, London.
Williams, Alfred. Villages of the White Horse 1913. Reprinted by Nonesuch Publishing, Stroud. 2007.
Williams, Alfred. Folk Songs of the Upper Thames Duckworth & Co., London. 1923. Various reprints.
Anyone wishing to know more about Alfred Williams' folksong collection may also wish to consult:
Bathe, Andrew Lee. Pedalling in the dark: the folk song collecting of Alfred Williams in the Upper Thames Valley, 1914-1916. A thesis submitted for PhD, National Centre for English Cultural Tradition (NATCECT), University of Sheffield. May 2006. (Copy held in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, London).

Mike Yates is a former editor of the Folk Music Journal, and, like Alfred Williams, has collected folk songs in the Thames Valley and elsewhere.

The songs collected by Alfred are now online - the large majority of a collection of more than a thousand songs which have been uploaded by Wiltshire County Council. Click here to go to the beginning of the list.