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The Worlds of Gilbert and Sullivan

Folk Music and Folk songs are as old as the hills!

Here are a few 'notes' we have gathered to help guide us in our search . . .

The strong tendency for human beings to get together, particularly on celebratory occasions, frequently expresses itself in some form of singing or dancing. Few or many; people will invariably join hands and/or voices in the common aim of performing together.

The term covering folk songs and folk dances - Folk Music - indicates one of unknown authorship. The songs are usually sung without accompaniment, and often in variants in both words and tunes, and passed on from generation to generation. In one sense English folk music has existed since the arrival of the English people in Britain. The Venerable Bede's story of the cattleman and later ecclesiastical musician Caedmon indicates that in the medieval period it was normal at feasts to pass around the harp and sing songs'. Since this type of music was rarely noted, we have little knowledge of its form or content. Some later tunes, eg for Morris dancing, may have their origins in this period. We know from a reference in William Langland's Piers Plowman, that ballads about Robin Hood were being sung from the fourteenth century and the oldest detailed material we have is Wynkyn de Worde's collection of Robin Hood ballads printed about 1495. (Here is a fragment of one artist's image of folk music to give visitors a wonderful indication of the scenes of yesteryear >>>. See bibliography for source)

There was distinct music for the court, the social elite from the sixteenth century also seem to have enjoyed, and contributed to the music of the people, as Henry VIII did with the tavern song 'Pastime with Good Company'. Late medieval social elites had their own culture, but were also able to participate in and affect popular traditions.

In the sixteenth century the growth changes in the wealth and culture of the upper social orders caused tastes in music to diverge. There was an internationalisation of courtly music in terms of instruments, such as the lute, dulcimer and early forms of the harpsichord, and with the development of madrigals, pavanes and galliards. For lower social classes, instruments like the pipe, tabor, bagpipe, shawm, hurdy gurdy, and crumhorn accompanied traditional music and community dance. The fiddle, well established in England by the 1660s, was unusual in being a key element in both the art music that developed in the baroque, and in popular song and dance.

By the mid-seventeenth century the music of the lower social orders was rediscovered, along with other aspects of popular culture such as festivals, folklore and dance. A number of early collections of printed material, including those published by John Playford (1651), and the private collections of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703).

In the eighteenth century there were increasing numbers of collections of what was now beginning to be defined as "folk" music, strongly influenced by the Romantic movement, including Thomas D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth: or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719-20) and Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). These also contained some oral material and by the end of the eighteenth century this was becoming increasingly common, with collections including John Ritson's, The Bishopric Garland (1784), which paralleled the work of figures like Robert Burns and Walter Scott in Scotland.

With the Industrial Revolution the music of the labouring classes began to change from rural life to include industrial work songs. Awareness that older kinds of song were being abandoned prompted renewed interest in collecting folk songs during the 1830s and 40s, including the work of William B. Sandys' Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern (1833), William Chappell, A Collection of National English Airs (1838) and Robert Bell's Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England (1846).

Technological change made new instruments available and led to the development of silver and brass bands, particularly in industrial centres in the north. The shift to urban centres also created new types of music, including from the 1850s the Music hall, which developed from performances in ale houses into theatres and became the dominant locus of English popular music for over a century This combined with increased literacy and print to allow the creation of new songs that built on, traditional music as composers like Lionel Monckton and Sidney Jones created music that reflected new social circumstances.

Many English folk songs have been lost to posterity but thanks to the diligent work of collectors and composers such as Cecil Sharpe, and Ralph Vaughan Williams lots were sought out, noted down or recorded, even harmonised and thus preserved to be enjoyed in all their fullness (and musical variation).

So, as one author puts it: let the band strike up and create a cheerful atmosphere. The Master of Ceremonies calls for order and the group starts their community dance (or song).    ENJOY . . .

First on our list of English folk songs is:

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