Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1872-1958
The composer Vaughan Williams collected his first folk song, ‘Bushes and Briars’, at Ingrave in Essex on December 4th 1903. Over the next ten years he noted down hundreds of traditional songs in counties including Dorset, County Durham, Herefordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Sussex. He appears to have made only one collecting trip to Kent, on 31st December 1904, when he collected eight songs from a Mr and Mrs Truell in Gravesend. One of these, ‘John Reilly’, appeared in the 1906 Journal of the Folk-Song Society, which was given over to songs from RVW’s collection.
Although he did not resume his song collecting activities after World War I, traditional music continued to be important for Vaughan Williams – he became president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society in 1932, and with A.L. Lloyd co-edited The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, published in 1959, after his death.
In his book Folk Songs collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams (J.M.Dent, 1983) Roy Palmer wrote
On the whole, Vaughan Williams was more interested in the song than the singer, in the melody than the message. He knew very well that a large number of traditional song texts had been preserved in the form of street ballads, and he preferred to spend the relatively small amount of time as his disposal in attempting to save tunes. […]
Some singers undoubtedly remembered only fragments of songs; in some cases, Vaughan Williams simply could not keep up with them, or could not hear very well, and gaps in manuscripts occurred, or he noted some verses, then wrote: ‘unfinished’. After all, he was trying to note melody and variants, and also, in longhand, the words.
Of the songs he took down from Mr and Mrs Truell, there are words for only three in his manuscripts, and one of those has only one verse. Even those which do have verses noted are not always easy to decipher, since Vaughan Williams’ handwriting could be very untidy, especially when writing at speed, and he also used shorthand / abbreviations for some words in the text.
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