The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #170618 Message #4213192
Posted By: GUEST,henryp
09-Dec-24 - 07:47 AM
Thread Name: Any December Songs?
Subject: RE: Any December Songs?
In December 1903, Ralph Vaughan Williams began his collection of folk songs.
4 December 1903 Vaughan Williams collected nineteen songs in the village of Ingrave, near Brentwood, Essex, including six from Mr Potiphar, four from a Mrs Horsnell, and five from a Mr Bloomfield. The first of these was Bushes and Briars sung by 74-year-old labourer Charles Potiphar. Vaughan Williams proclaimed "I felt it was something I had known all my life".
7 December 1903 Vaughan Williams was clearly excited by his discovery of folk singers. Only three days after his visit to Ingrave, he arranged for Henry Burstow to travel the ten miles from Horsham to his home at Leith Hill Place, where he used a phonograph to record the old man singing at least eight songs. One of these was Basket of Eggs, also known as The Biter Bit. Burstow remembered ‘I was amazed beyond expression to hear my own songs thus repeated in my own voice.’
Late December 1903 Vaughan Williams was at his childhood home, Leith Hill Place, for the Christmas holidays when he set off on his bike ‘equipped with notebook and pencil’ to find songs ‘almost at his own doorstep’. Vaughan Williams didn’t note down the exact date when he heard ‘The Ploughboy’s Dream’ sung by Mr Garman, but it was probably sung a couple of days after Christmas when he collected further songs from another local resident near his home at Leith Hill Place, Surrey. In The English Hymnal, Vaughan Williams matched the tune, now familiar as Forest Green, with the words of a mid-19th century American poem, ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’, written by Phillips Brooks, an Episcopalian preacher from New England.
‘The Poachers’ sung by Isaac Longhurst at Broadmoor, Surrey. Isaac Longhurst lived at Forest Green. Mr Garman lived at Ockley. Vaughan Williams probably got their home villages mixed up when he met the two men at Broadmoor on the day when Garman sang ‘The Ploughboy’s Dream'.
See Vaughan Williams's Journey into Folk by Caroline Davison https://carolinedavison.substack.com/ with links to recordings where you can hear her sing the first verse of a song from each of the forty days that Vaughan Williams collected them, between December 1903 and January 1905.