The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #56384   Message #881452
Posted By: Malcolm Douglas
03-Feb-03 - 12:36 PM
Thread Name: Tune Kingsfold
Subject: RE: Tune Kingsfold
I forgot to mention that the hymn-tune is called Kingsfold because it was in the Sussex village of Kingsfold (in the pub, The Wheatsheaf, as it happens) that the composer and folk song collector Ralph Vaughan Williams noted the melody from a Mr Booker, who sung the broadside murder-ballad Maria Martin to it. That was in December 1904. Mr Booker's variant of the tune was published in the Journal of the Folk Song Society, vol.II (issue 7) 1905, along with other versions found both with that song and with Come all ye Worthy Christian Men (and various other titles), Dives and Lazarus, and so on.