Songs of the West. S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
Wagner has taught us to be content with musical phrases alone. Melody is a musical idea worked out in successive notes of our scale. Modern music is constructed in but two of the seven diatonic modes, in which melodies may be cast, the major and the minor; with the result that the modern ear entertains no appreciation of an air that is not in the Ionian scale, the "tonus lascivus" of the ancients.
The jongleur or minstrel had but the rudest of instruments; the peasant singer had none at all. What interest he can create, what effect he can produce, must be through melody alone. Now, I venture to assert that the folk music of the English peasantry has been surpassingly rich in melodiousness, and that no tune has had a chance of living and being transmitted from generation to generation, unless it have a distinct individuality in it, in a word, contains a melodious idea. Moreover, not having been framed only in the common major or minor key, it is abundantly varied. It has been a well-spring from which hitherto we have not drawn.
In former times, that strongly defined dividing line which separates the cultured from the uncultured did not exist. The music of the peasant was also the music of the court; the ballad was the delight of the cottager and of the noble lady in her bower. But the separation began, in music, in the Elizabethan days; in ballads, in those of James I., when nearly every old ballad was re-written to fresh metres, unsingable to the traditional airs. The skilled musician scorned folk melodies, and revelled in counter-point.
It is a mistake to suppose that all mediæval music was in the Gregorian modes other than our major and minor. Even in the 13th century, the modern major mode was used, so that some of our traditional airs, which seem to be modern may really be old.
M. Tiersot notes that among the melodies extant of three trouvères of the Thirteenth century, a certain number are modern in character. Of twenty-two airs by the Chatelain de Coucy, three are frankly in the major; five others in the 7th or the 8th tone, give the impression of the major. Of nine melodies by the King of Navarre, four are in the major, a fifth in the 7th tone, is of the same nature as those of De Coucy. Of thirty-four chansons by Adam de la Hall, twenty-one are in the major.
The folk airs that we give in our collection may not please at first, certainly will not please all; but when once a relish for them has been acquired, then hearers will turn with weariness from the ordinary concert hall feebleness, as we turn from the twaddle of a vacuous female. We have found it necessary to take down all the variants of the same air that we have come across.
M. Bourgault Ducoudray, in his introduction to "Mélodies populaires de Basse Bretagne," Paris, 1885, says: "When a song has been transmitted from mouth to mouth, without having been fixed by notation, it is exposed to alterations. One is sometimes obliged to collect as many as twenty variants of the same air, before finding one that is good. This is the greatest difficulty to the seeker; it is as hard to lay the hand on the veritable typal form of a melody as it is to meet with an intact specimen among the shells that have been rolled on the sea shore." When a party of singers is assembled, or when one man sings a succession of ballads, the memory becomes troubled; the first few melodies are given correctly, but after that, the airs become deflected and influenced by the airs last sung. At Two Bridges one old singer, G. Kerswell, after giving us "The Bell-ringers," sang us half-a-dozen ballads but the melody of the bells went through them all, and vitiated them all so as to render them worthless. On another occasion, we took down four or five airs all beginning alike, because one singer had impressed this beginning on the minds of the others. At another time, when this impression was worn off, they would sing correctly, and then the beginnings would be different. Experience taught us never to take down too much at one sitting.
In a very few years all this heritage of traditional folk music will be gone; and this is the supreme moment at which such a collection can be made. Already, nearly every one of my old singers from whom these melodies were gathered, is dead. They are passing away everywhere. Few counties of England have been worked. Sussex has been well explored by the late Rev. John Broadwood, and then by Miss Lucy Broadwood3; Yorkshire, by Mr. Frank Kidson; Northumberland, by Dr. Collingwood Bruce and Mr. John Stokoe. Mr. Cecil Sharp is now engaged on Somersetshire, and Dr. Vaughan Williams on Essex. Who will undertake Lincolnshire, Dorset, Hampshire, and other counties? The purely agricultural districts are most auriferous. In manufacturing counties modern music has driven out the traditional folk melodies.
With regard to the approximate dates of the airs we give, all that we can say is that such as are in the ancient modes are not later than the reign of James I. How much more ancient they may be, it is impossible to determine. The melodies of the Handel and Arne, and then those of the Hooke and Dibden periods can be at once detected. Some few of the melodies we have taken down were certainly originally in one or other of the ancient modes, but in process of time have been subjected to alteration, to accommodate them to the modern ear.
Although some seventy per cent. of the airs noted from the very old singers are modal, we have not given too many of these, as the popular taste is not sufficiently educated to relish them. But such as can not perceive the beauty of the tunes that go, for instance, to "The Trees they are so high," in the rarely used Phrygian mode, "Flora, the Flower of the West," in F, "Henry Martyn," "On a May morning so early," etc., are indeed to be pitied. We have not been able to give those lengthy ballads, such as, "The Outlandish Knight," "The Brown Girl," "By the Banks of Green Willow," "The Baffled Knight," "William and the Shepherd's Daughter," "Captain Ward," "The Golden Glove," "The Maid and the Box," "The Death of Queen Jane," etc., which are too long to be sung and listened to with patience now-a-days.
In some instances we have set other words to a ballad tune, as XXXVI. One of my old singers said to me concerning this ballad, "When my little sister, now dead, these twenty years, was a child, and went up from Exeter to London with me in a carrier's van, Lor bless'y, afore railways was invented, I mind that she sang this here ballet in the waggon all the way up. We was three days about it. She was then about six years old." The ballet, by the way, is not particularly choice and suitable for a child or a grown-up girl to sing, according to our ideas.
In giving these songs to the public, we have been scrupulous to publish the airs precisely as noted down, choosing among the variants those which commended themselves to us as the soundest. But we have not been so careful with regard to the words. These are sometimes in a fragmentary condition, or are coarse, contain double entendres, or else are mere doggerel. Accordingly, we have re-written the songs wherever it was not possible to present them in their original form. This was done by the Scotch. Many an old ballad is gross, and many a broadside is common-place. Songs that were thought witty in the Caroline and early Georgian epochs, are no longer sufferable; and broadside ballads are in many cases vulgarised versions of earlier ballads that have been lost in their original forms.
What a change has taken place in public feeling with regard to decency may be judged by the way in which Addison speaks of D'Urfey in "The Guardian," 1713, No. 29. "A judicious author, some years since, published a collection of sonnets, which he very successfully called "Laugh and be Fat; or, Pills to purge Melancholy." I can not sufficiently admire the facetious title of these volumes, and must censure the world of ingratitude, while they are so negligent in rewarding the jocose labours of my friend, Mr. D'Urfey, who was so large a contributor to this treatise, and to whose numerous productions so many rural squires in the remotest parts of the island are obliged for the dignity and state which corpulency gives them." And again, in No. 67, "I must heartily recommend to all young ladies, my disciples, the case of my old friend, who has often made their grand-mothers merry, and whose sonnets have perhaps lulled to sleep many a present toast, when she lay in her cradle." Why—D'Urfey's Pills must now-a-days be kept under lock and key. The fun so commended by the pious and grave Addison is filth of the most revolting description. And yet the grand-mothers of the ladies of his day, according to him, were wont to sing them over the cradles of their grand-children!
So when a "Collection of Old Ballads" was published 1723–5, the Editor, after giving a series of historical and serious pieces, in a later volume apologises to the ladies for their gravity, and for their special delectation furnishes an appendix of songs that are simply dirty.
A good many of the ditties in favour with our rural song-men, are, it must be admitted, of the D'Urfey type; and what is more some of the very worst are sung to the daintiest early melodies. Two