was unable to sing, but could recite the words of ballads; but Mr. J. Webb, captain of a mine hard by, knew his tunes, and could very sweetly pipe them. On Blackdown, Mary Tavy, lived a mason, Samuel Fone, he died in 1898. He had an almost inexhaustible supply. Further songs were yielded by a singing blacksmith, John Woodrich, of Woolacott Moor, Thrushleton, commonly known as "Ginger Jack"; also by Roger Luxton, of Halwell, by James Olver, Tanner, Launceston, a native of S. Kewe, Cornwall; by John Masters, of Bradstone, aged 83; by William Rice and John Rickards, both of Lamerton; by William Friend, labourer, Lydford; Edmund Fry, thatcher, a native of Lezant, Cornwall; Roger Hannaford, Widdecombe; Will and Roger Huggins, Lydford; W. Bickle, Bridestowe; Matthew Baker, a poor cripple, Lew Down; John Dingle, Coryton; J. Peake, tanner, Liskeard; and Mr. S. Gilbert, the aged innkeeper of the "Falcon," Mawgan, in Pyder. More were obtained from old singers at Two Bridges and Post Bridge on Dartmoor, from others at Chagford, at Holne, and at South Brent. From others again at Menheniot, Cornwall, and at Fowey. Some songs taken down from moor men on Dartmoor, in or about 1868, were sent me by W. Crossing, Esq., who knows Dartmoor better than any man living; others by T.S. Cayzer, Esq., taken down in 1849. Miss Bidder, of Stoke Flemming, most kindly searched her neighbourhood for old women who knew ancient songs, and sent me what she obtained. We had several rare old melodies from Sally Satterley,2 now dead, of Huccaby Bridge, Dartmoor. She had acquired them from her father, a crippled fiddler.
Of the vast quantities of tunes that we have collected, perhaps a third are very good, a third are good, and the remainder indifferent. The singers are almost invariably illiterate and aged, and when they die the tradition will be lost, for the present generation will have nothing to do with these songs, especially such as are modal, and supplant them with the vulgarest music hall compositions. The melodies are far more precious than the words, and we have been more concerned to rescue these than the words, which are often common-place, and may frequently be found on broadside ballad sheets. The words are less frequently of home growth than the airs, and over and over again we came upon ballads already in print, but not to the tunes to which they are sung elsewhere. There are, in fact, only a few, such as "Cupid's Garden," "Bold General Wolf," "Lord Thomas and the Fair Eleanor," "Barbara Allen," "Outward Bound," "The Mermaid," that retain the melodies to which sung in other parts of England. But, "Tobacco is an Indian Weed," "Joans' Ale is New," "The Fox," and many others have tunes to which sung in Devon and Cornwall that are quite different and local. A remarkable instance is that of "Sweet Nightingale." This appeared in 1761 with music by Dr. Arne. The words travelled down to Cornwall, not so Arne's tune, and they were there set to an entirely independent melody. Then again, when a tune did travel West, and was heard by some of the peasant singers, if it did not commend itself to their taste, they altered it, perhaps quite unconsciously into a form more satisfactory to their minds. I have given a very curious example of this, "Upon a Sunday Morning."
Our folk music is a veritable moraine of rolled and ground fragments from musical strata far away. It contains melodies of all centuries from the days of the minstrels down to the present time, all thrown together in one heap. It must be borne well in mind that to the rustic singer, melody is everything. It was so in the days before Elizabeth. The people then did not want harmony; to them harmony is quite a modern invention and need.
At the present day, we are so accustomed to choral and concerted music that we have come to care little for formal melody, and 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
