Song, Folk Music and Folk Customs
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Annie Dearman (voice) and Steve Harrison (melodeon, mouth-organ, anglo concertina, bagpipes) Annie and Steve perform traditional songs in a robust and firmly rooted English style, taking their repertory from traditional singers and the folk song collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Rural lovesong
Annie Dearman tells us how she came to appreciate the song after her visit to the song collection at the Vaughan Williams and Bodleian Libraries.
Woodcut by permission, The Bodleian Library
THE PROCESS OF PUTTING TOGETHER A SONG can take a few hours or a few years. The longer you are involved in traditional music, the more strands you are likely to put together to make a song.
I have been inspired by the Musical Traditions website, which has a section in which singers are invited to make available the workings of a song in their repertory. The song Pretty Ploughboy is not untypical of the process by which the Dearman, Gammon and Harrison repertory is developed.
Having spent a fair number of years singing in various harmony groups in Essex, my home county, I naturally spent many hours at Cecil Sharp house trawling for suitable material. I had amassed many photocopies, some of which were never pressed into service at the time, but languished in files until recently.
My move to Yorkshire some fifteen years ago ironically rekindled an interest in singing songs collected in Essex. One photocopy of a song collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams in Ingrave not far from Ingatestone where her grandmother was born, showed only one verse and a delightful tune, immediately seized upon by my partner Steve. This fragment set me on a quest to find more.
Enquiries to Cecil Sharp house revealed more tunes and verses, none of which took our fancy (though you might take a different view - see below). I then turned my attention to the Broadside collection housed at the Bodleian Library and containing wonderful facsimiles of ballad sheets, some complete with picture headings).
Steve and I have used a text that we uncovered there to form the basis of the song, though we adapted its metre to fit our preferred tune and added a refrain in the Sussex style. There are, no doubt, many more versions of this song, and if you are interested in searching then out and fashioning them to your individual taste you could be rewarded with a real sense of ownership and connection.
This is how Steve, Vic and I feel about the songs we have worked upon. We hope this example will encourage you to do the same with the songs you choose to sing; after all it has never been easier thanks to new technology to find and access songs even if you have never visited Cecil Sharp House or bought a book of folk songs.
