Review

Reviewed Work(s): Folk Songs Collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams by Roy Palmer
Review by: Michael Kennedy
Source: Folk Music Journal, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1983), pp. 403-405
Published by: English Folk Dance + Song Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4522132
Accessed: 08-10-2020 08:13 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

English Folk Dance + Song Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Folk Music Journal

This content downloaded from 132.174.253.9 on Thu, 08 Oct 2020 08:13:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Reviews

Books
FOLK SONGS COLLECTED BY RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS. Edited by ROY
Palmer. London: J. M. Dent. 1983. xxii + 209pp. Illus. £10.95.
Roy Palmer's book contains 121 of the 800-odd folksongs which Vaughan
Williams collected between 1903 and 1913. Mr Palmer has classified them
into the eighteen counties in which they were taken down from the mouths
of the country singers. Seventy have not hitherto been published, thus
making this selection a valuable addition to folksong bibliography, for it is
regrettable that many of Vaughan Williams's own early arrangements,
published in volume form, are out of print. Among the rarities included are
'Elwina of Waterloo', not a particularly inspired tune, the more interesting
'Duke William' and 'The Ranter Parson'. Of course 'Bushes and Briars' is
included and the wonderful 'The Captain's Apprentice', also a version of
'Our Captain Calls' under the title 'Fountains Flowing'.
Mr Palmer is strictly more concerned with the words of the songs and
with their origins than with the melodies themselves. He is very much a
social historian and, although his introduction discloses his awareness of
the contemporary problems confronting Vaughan Williams and gives all
the pros and cons, he seems rather displeased that Vaughan Williams was
not as bothered about the words as he would have liked him to be! But the
point is that Vaughan Williams was a collector of folksongs not a folksong
collector, and there is a subtle difference. He was before everything else a
composer, and music was both the driving and the guiding force in his life.
Mr Palmer's necessarily abbreviated account of the arousal of Vaughan
Williams's interest in folksong needs fleshing out. It is especially remark-
able that Vaughan Williams, as Mr Palmer records, gave a series of
university extension lectures on folksong before he had seriously entered
the field of practical collecting. In these talks he scarcely, if ever, mentioned
the texts of the songs. He spoke repeatedly of the beauty of the tunes.
When he wrote to the Morning Post in 1903 urging county councils to
organize folksong collecting imagine! before all the old singers died
he wrote of 'beautiful melodies' being lost to the world forever, and it was
because of those melodies that he himself set aside some time each year to
go collecting, even though, as he once told me, he did not enjoy it very
much. He was shy and reserved, even if convivial, and so no doubt were the
old men in the pubs and the women in the villages at the turn of the century
who must have been surprised to be confronteJby earnest musicians taking
down their songs or producing a 'new-fangled' machine into which they
were asked to sing. Mr Palmer gives Vaughan Williams his due for
preserving so many 'immense riches' but adds this stricture: 'A modern
collector would wish to record every possible item from a singer's

403

This content downloaded from 132.174.253.9 on Thu, 08 Oct 2020 08:13:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
repertoire, together with any information, not only about how he or she
learned the songs, but also on attitudes to them, views on their meaning and
function, and their place in his or her life.' Exactly, a modern collector
would. Folksong collecting has become a branch of sociology, even of
politics, I sometimes suspect. But in 1903 and 1904 the 'meaning and
function' of these songs simply would not have occurred to a composer-
collector, and if it did he probably realised what kind of answers his probing
might have elicited. 'On the whole', as Mr Palmer himself points out,
'Vaughan Williams was more interested in the song than the singer, in the
melody than the message'. However deplorable it may seem to the
sociologist of 1983, it is a good thing for the history of English music that he
was.
Nevertheless, as Mr Palmer fairly acknowledges, Vaughan Williams
made several references in his notebooks to certain characteristics of his
singers: he was undoubtedly interested in them as people but not, I suspect,
as social phenomena or case-histories, for he never patronized anyone. Mr
Palmer writes apropos certain of these notes,
What were the rest of Mr Stacey's fifty songs, since Vaughan Williams took down
only five? Where did Mr Poll learn to play the fiddle? Did Mr Willis learn his songs at
home or in the army? If the latter were they sung in the Crimea and India, and on
what occasions? Where did Mr Earle buy his 'ballets' (street ballads) and where did
he find the tunes to put to them?

One can only reply that he has got the wrong man. The 'interview in depth'
was not Vaughan Williams's aim when he went to King's Lynn and
Horsham and Weobley. In this connection, though, it is encouraging to
read that Mr Palmer has little time for the suggestion that the 'middle-class'
(oh what a dreadful crime!) song-collectors 'exploited' the singers and
wrenched the songs out of context. It is inverted class snobbery, surely, to
suggest that a folksong should only be sung by an untrained singer. To hear
a superb singer - a Ferrier, for example - in one of these beautiful
melodies is an overwhelming experience and it would, I am convinced,
have overwhelmed Mrs Verrall of Horsham, the singer of 'Our Captain
Calls', had she lived to hear it. Mr Palmer also lightly touches on Vaughan
Williams's disinclination - opposed to the method of Grainger and Bartok
- to use the phonograph (he recorded fewer than 20 songs mechanically).
'Perhaps he was put off by the mechanical difficulties', he writes. To which I
would add merely that if Mr Palmer had watched the elderly Vaughan
Williams try to put a battery in his hearing-aid he would have no further
doubts about why the younger Vaughan Williams preferred his notebook
and pencil! Some people are born 'all fingers and thumbs' and he was one of
them.
Perhaps Mr Palmer's book should more accurately be called 'The Words
of Folk Songs Collected by Vaughan Williams' because he has supplied the
expertise in this direction to which Vaughan Williams made no pretension.
Each tune is preceded by a most illuminating and deeply researched
account of the song's and the text's origins, mentioning other versions,
tracking down historical allusions and, of course, printing the words. There
is a list of sources and notes, scholarly and accurate and also highly readable
for all sorts of diverting asides. Mr Palmer makes the predictable point
about the pre-1914 bowdlerizing of many of the texts, and excludes
Vaughan Williams ('no prude') from any stricture in this respect except for

404

This content downloaded from 132.174.253.9 on Thu, 08 Oct 2020 08:13:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
not
notbothering
bothering
to preserve
to preserve
words of some
words
of the
ofsongs
somewhich
of the
thetaste
songs
of the
which the
day
daydiddid
notnot
permit
permit
to be printed.
to beHowever,
printed. when
However,
he asserts that
whenVaughan
he asserts tha
Williams did not note the words of 'The Lousy Tailor' because he was 'so
horrified' by them, I doubt if he is on the right track.
The book has very few misprints and none that matters. The type and the
music-type are clear. It comes very appositely for the twenty-fifth
anniversary of Vaughan Williams's death and it deserves to stimulate
renewed interest in some of the rarer songs it includes. That, I am
convinced, has been Mr Palmer's primary aim and it is a worthy one.
MICHAEL KENNEDY

FOLK
FOLKSONGS
SONGSOF OF
THETHE
CATSKILLS.
CATSKILLS.
Edited Edited
and annotated
and annotated
by Normanby
Cazden,
Norm
Herbert Haufrecht, and Norman Studer. With a foreword by Pete
Seeger. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 1982.
xv + 650 pp. $60.50 (paperbound $19.95).
NOTES AND SOURCES FOR FOLK SONGS OF THE CATSKILLS. By Norman
Cazden, Herbert Haufrecht, and Norman Studer. Albany, New York:
State University of New York Press. 1982. 188 pp.
Anthologizing of folksong has been a popular sport for several hundred
years. It has its amateurs, its fanatics, its scholars, and its in-group and
jargonizers. There are those who use it to 'keep fit', those who use it to
extend their concept of social organization, and those who use folksong as
therapy. Primarily, a book of songs should promote the songs in clear print
with easily readable melodic lines. Certainly Folk Songs of the Catskills
does this. The simplicity of the notations stands in stark contrast to the
notes, which are so complex and lengthy that they require a separate
volume.
It is an anthology with a difference. The songs were collected by many
people over a twenty-year period at Camp Woodland, an unusual
summer-camp established and patronized largely by well-to-do New
Yorkers and their parents. Unlike most summer-camps, it made an attempt
to understand and become part of the idyllic area in which it was set in
upper New York state. The Catskill mountains have only been settled by
Europeans since the early 1800s. The extensive and compelling introduc-
tion takes us through the Dutch settlers, the hemlock industry, farming,
tanning, lumbering, hooping, furniture-making, thence to quarrying,
dairying, canalling, hunting, and the inexorable annexing of this wild and
beautiful area to the commuting and holiday patterns of New York City.
We are introduced to the singers, the working people whose songs made
this book possible. It was a rich mixture - Irish, Canadian, Dutch,
German, Italian, blacks from the southern USA and, more recently, the
Polish, the Greeks, and the Puerto Ricans. The presence of the non-
English-speaking immigrant is hardly reflected at all in the body of the
songs. Perhaps assimilation took place so quickly that the secondary
cultures (linguistically speaking) were submerged. Perhaps the collectors
did not seek this material out, being English-speakers themselves. Perhaps
in those days there was not the pride or kudos of belonging to an ethnic
minority.
The descriptions of collecting are graphic, often humorous, familiar to
anyone who has ever been bitten by the bug. The trackers were not only

405

This content downloaded from 132.174.253.9 on Thu, 08 Oct 2020 08:13:17 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms