The Seeds of Love
Collecting English Folk Music, words and music of Vaughan Williams, Grainger, Sharp and Butterworth.

The Seeds of Love recreates the wonder and excitement of the early twentieth-century collectors of English folk song, as they searched the countryside for singers of ‘genuine’ song. Diaries, letters and writings demonstrate their enthusiasm and respect for folk music, and provide amusing and reflective anecdotes: of countrymen and women, of bicycles, notebooks, and of phonographs. The story is illustrated by some of the folk songs themselves, performed either as arranged by the collectors, or in Opus Anglicanum’s own arrangements, or as they were originally discovered: solo and unaccompanied.

The programme commences at the formation of the Folk-Song Society in 1898 and ends with the death of Cecil Sharp in 1924, but it is also cyclic, following the shape of the pagan year, in that it starts with a Maysong, progresses through Springtime (The Seeds of Love), Summertime (Morris Dancing), Autumn (John Barleycorn) and Winter (Carols) to return to May Day.

The collecting movement, 1903-1924
Several different concerns motivated the collectors. Vaughan Williams, Grainger, and Butterworth used both tunes and also the unfamiliar modality in their compositions; for others the music held intense antiquarian interest. There was a sense of ‘rescue archeology’ too, the notion that the singing of these songs was all but dead and would certainly die out within a very few years. And the Victorian passion for collecting also played a part: like butterflies or fossils, the precise number of song specimens brought back from a field trip would be modestly advertised .
Another powerful motivation for the aquisition of the songs and dances was the romantic notion of an English pastoral culture only lately defunct after a continuity of thousands of years. “As recently as thirty or forty years ago every village in England was a nest of singing birds”, wrote Sharp in 1907, “and the folk-singers of today are the last of a long line that stretches back into the mists of far-off days.” Therefore the collectors sought out elderly country people rather than urban singers. Comfortably removed by social class from their informants, they went in search of their quarry, the elusive songs or dances which they believed to be almost extinct. Only their efforts, they believed, could rescue for future generations these rare specimens, relics of a culture rooted in prehistory. That the songs were truly ancient no one doubted: their antiquity was guarenteed by the age and rural location of the singers.

After 1924
The subsequent evaluation of this idea as fanciful does nothing to diminish the achievement of these collectors, and the period of activity covered by our programme was of fundamental importance to the history of folk music in England. It was however by no means the end of the story. The work of collecting continued, and continues to this day, each generation in turn fuelled by a sense of urgency, that it is late in the day for folk song. From the fifties onward Peter Kennedy built up an astonishing and valuable archive of field recordings from the British Isles, demonstrating that there were still many ‘traditional’ singers of folk song contrary to the commonly held opinion. And even today, a hundred years after the Folk-Song Society was founded to rescue folk songs before they died out, the small, newly founded East Anglian recording company ‘Veteran’ is devoted to issuing recent recordings of traditional singers. Alongside the commercialism of folk festivals and the young folk instrumentalists, the different and unmistakable ‘other’ culture of the folk arts which commanded the dedication and respect of the collectors before the first war continues to live largly unseen and unheard.

PROGRAMME

1 Hal an Tow, May Morning Song, Helston, Cornwall arr. P.T. Nardone
2 The Inauguration of the Folk-Song Society Journal of the Folk-Song Society 1899
3 I Sowed the Seeds of Love arr. R. Vaughan Williams
4 The Revd. Charles Manson’s account of Sharp’s visit to Hambridge
5 Lord Randel
6 Cecil Sharp in Somerset
Folksongs from Somerset:
7 The Gipsy Ladddie
8 The Water is Wide
9 The Coal Black Smith
Ralph Vaughan Williams:
10 An inate sense of folk song: Dives and Lazarus
11 First song collected: Bushes and Briars
12 Folk tunes as hymns: Our Captain calls All Hands/ He who would valiant be; The Ploughboys Dream/ O little town of Bethlehem
13 Collecting with George Butterworth: The Turtle Dove
14 In a gipsy encampment: Cold blows the wind tonight
15 Collecting with the Phonograph Percy Grainger
16 Brigg Fair arr. Percy Grainger
17 Diary of Morris-Dance Hunting George Butterworth
18 The Cutty Wren
19 The Eynsham Morris Cecil Sharp
20 John Barleycorn
21 The War Journal of the Folk-Song Society 1916
22 High Germany arr. R. Vaughan Williams
23 George Butterworth Journal of the Folk-Song Society 1916
24 Banks of Green Willow George Butterworth (arr. S. Chenery)
25 Sailors’ Chanties collected by Harry E. Piggot Journal of the Folk-Song Society 1916
26 Chanties:
Sally Brown
Stormalong
Way Haul Away
Shenandoah
Fire, Fire
Johnny Bowker
27 Sharp’s death The Travelling Morrice, Log of the First Tour
Letter from Louie Hooper, 12/10/31
28 The Padstow Maysong arr. P.T. Nardone

Recorded in the John Wood Chapel, Prior Park, Bath, July 1997, by kind permission of the Headmaster.
Producer: Nigel Perrin