Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Sharp was at that time teaching music in a preparatory school. As in the wider musical world, German influence was marked in musical education, and Sharp decided that the music he had heard at Headington, which consisted of ‘good, strong, simple melodies which were essentially English in character’, should be taught in schools. In 1902 he compiled and published A Book of British Songs for Home and School, and while its contents were taken from printed sources, notably Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Times, it included a number of folk songs. This was no mere antiquarianism; as with Parry, for Sharp folk music was bound up with notions of Englishness and national regeneration. ‘Our system of education is, at present, too cosmopolitan,’ he wrote in 1907; ‘it is calculated to produce citizens of the world rather than Englishmen. And it is Englishmen, English citizens, that we want. How can this be remedied? By taking care, I would suggest, that every child born to English parents is, in its earliest days, placed in possession of all those things which are the distinctive products of its race.’ These included the English language (‘the mother tongue’); ‘the folk tales, legends and proverbs, which are peculiar to the English; the national sports, pastimes, and dances, also’. And of course folk songs: ‘English folk songs for English children, not German, French, or even Scottish or Irish’. These songs were

  simple ditties which have sprung like wild flowers from the very hearts of our countrymen, and which are as redolent of the English race as its language. If every English child be placed in possession of all these products, he will know and understand his country and his countrymen far better than he does at present; and knowing and understanding them he will love them the more, realize that he is united to them by the subtle bond of blood and kinship, and become, in the highest sense of the word, a true patriot.

  The idea that the nation could be bound together and reinvigorated by old country songs and dances would persist into the First World War, where folk songs often featured in concerts for the troops. The theatre producer Lena Ashwell’s book Modern Troubadours (1922) provided ‘A Record of the Concerts at the Front’ that she had organised. ‘When Miss Carrie Tubb and Miss Phyllis Lett were in France in September 1916 with the Westminster Singers, they all agreed that the taste of the soldier audiences was extraordinarily good,’ she reported. ‘They loved the old folk-songs.’ Troops were even taught folk dance, presumably following Sharp’s suggestion that this kind of recreation led to ‘the quickening of the national spirit’. According to Ashwell,

  At one point there was quite a big vogue in France for the country dances, folk dances, morris and sword dances. All this work was started by Miss [D.C.] Dakin[g], and there were a number of teachers in different Bases who undertook to teach these dances to the men. Some of them were wildly enthusiastic, and thoroughly enjoyed the dances; of course, some of the men were ‘bored to tears’. There were weekly demonstrations in many of the huts, but the dancing was especially used in convalescent camps […] I heard delightful stories of the band playing on the sands of Trouville, while the convalescents danced themselves back to health.

  One soldier was even reported by Sharp’s associate Maud Karpeles to have joined in and completed the dance ‘with an amputated toe in a new boot’.

  The demand was such that the English Folk Dance Society eventually sent out fifteen teachers to the front. During demonstrations ‘Everyone crowded round; no one laughed; someone said “That’s the stuff to give ’em”.’ As one historian put it: ‘The spiritual essence of the England for which these men had fought and suffered was thus instilled in order to restore them to health. Thaumaturgy had its place alongside surgery in the shambles of the Somme – evocative enough for what folk-music had come to stand for, and of the power with which it was invested.’ Karpeles conceded that ‘not many of the men joined the [English Folk Dance] Society after they had been demobilized’, but if folk dancing hadn’t actually won the war, it was nevertheless celebrated along with the Allied victory. During the elaborate Peace Day celebrations in July 1919, the society organised an event in Hyde Park at which one thousand people performed folk dances, accompanied by the band of the Fourth Royal Fusiliers.

  The folk music that had kept the troops on their toes had been collected and preserved by a group of enthusiasts, headed by Cecil Sharp. In the late summer of 1903 Sharp had gone to stay with the Rev. Charles Marson, whom he had met in Adelaide but who was now vicar of Hambridge in Somerset. He was accompanied by Mattie Kay, a young woman with a fine voice and perfect diction whom he had met in Lancashire and more or less adopted, encouraging her to undergo proper musical training. While taking tea in the vicarage garden, Sharp overheard someone singing to himself as he mowed the lawn. Upon making enquiries, Sharp discovered that the song was ‘The Seeds of Love’ and that the singing gardener was called – most appropriately – John England. Sharp took down the song, harmonised the tune, and that same evening he and Mattie Kay performed it at a choir supper. The song was a familiar one, but as a member of the audience put it, this was the first time that it ‘had been put into evening dress’.

  There would later be criticism that this kind of arrangement of folk song for performance in the concert hall took a rural working-class tradition and traduced it, sprucing it up for consumption by middle-class metropolitan audiences. There is no doubt that it is a very different experience listening to the recording Vaughan Williams made in around 1908 of an Essex countrywoman singing ‘Bushes and Briars’ unaccompanied and listening to the tenor Robert Tear singing the song in the composer’s arrangement with a spare piano accompaniment. Had it not been for people like Sharp and Vaughan Williams, however, it is quite possible that such songs would have been lost for ever. Vaughan Williams had been aware of traditional tunes since childhood, when he first heard ‘The Cherry-Tree Carol’. This song perhaps dates back as far as the fifteenth century and was included in Christmas Carols, Old and New (1871), edited by John Stainer and the hymnologist Henry Ramsden Bramley. The words, in their many variants, were also included in Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which became a major source of folk-song lyrics. In 1893, when he was twenty-one, Vaughan Williams discovered ‘Dives and Lazarus’, dating back to the mid-sixteenth century, which Lucy Broadwood and J.A.F. Maitland had included in their English County Songs. ‘I had that sense of recognition,’ he later recalled, ‘– “here’s something which I have known all my life – only I didn’t know it!”’ In 1903 he was invited to a parish tea at Ingrave in Essex, where he had been told that some of the elderly villagers might be able to sing old songs for him. He was introduced to a labourer called Charles Pottipher, who agreed to perform for him in private. Like Sharp, who went on to note down further Somerset folk songs, publishing 130 of them in five parts between 1904 and 1919, Vaughan Williams would be inspired by Pottipher’s rendition of ‘Bushes and Briars’ to begin collecting folk songs, eventually taking down more than 800 in Essex, Sussex and Norfolk.

  Sharp himself also travelled farther afield and collected some 1500 tunes in four short years. Some of these were published in book form, but many others appeared in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society, which was founded in 1899. By the time he died in 1924, Sharp had collected around 3000 tunes from twenty-seven English counties, as well as another 1700 tunes of English origin in the Appalachians during extended trips to America during the First World War.

  The old songs of unschooled country people seem at first sight an unlikely starting point for a wholesale national musical renaissance. It was felt, however, that because folk songs had been handed down orally, generation after generation, and in rural regions remote from the musical fashions that swept through the major cities and national academies, they had an unimpeachable authenticity. This was the music of the people, reaching far back into England’s past, kept alive in English villages, and unsullied by the Continental tastes and influences that had been embraced by the metropolitan musical establishment. In addition, many of the tunes, even when sung in the un
accompanied quavering voices of the elderly, were both highly sophisticated and extremely beautiful. As Vaughan Williams put it, writing of Sharp’s Folk Songs from Somerset (1904–19):

  Such a wealth of beauty as this volume, containing, to mention only a few, ‘High Germany’, ‘The False Bride’, ‘Searching for Lambs’ and ‘The Crystal Spring’, was something we had never dreamed of. And where did it all come from? It was not a bit like Purcell or [Thomas] Arne or Sterndale Bennett.* Nor apparently could we trace it to watered-down reminiscences of Schubert or Mendelssohn. It must therefore be indigenous […] Sharp believed, and we believe, that there, in the fastness of rural England, was the well-spring of English music; tunes of classical beauty which vied with all the most beautiful melody in the world, and traceable to no source other than the minds of unlettered country men, who unknown to the squire and the parson were singing their own songs, and, as Hubert Parry says, ‘liked what they made and made what they liked’.

  Vaughan Williams’s reference to the unwitting squire and parson suggests a further appeal that folk music held for him and composers such as Gustav Holst: as committed socialists, they were delighted to embrace and promote a working-class musical tradition.

  Composers made both simple and complex arrangements of folk songs, putting them into evening dress for solo singers or choral groups. Vaughan Williams himself began arranging folk songs at around the time the first settings of Housman’s poems appeared. He arranged ‘Bushes and Briars’ in 1903 and five other songs from Essex the following year, publishing a collection of fifteen Folk Songs from the Eastern Counties in 1908. He would go on to publish some 260 arrangements of English folk songs, carols and dances, along with another thirty-one arrangements of Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Continental ones. It is no coincidence that two other composers known for their settings of Housman – E.J. Moeran and George Butterworth – also collected and arranged English folk songs.

  The greater influence of folk song in the classical world was upon orchestral writing. Elgar had already established himself by the time Sharp began collecting, and despite his attendance at the first meeting of the EFSS thereafter paid little attention to folk tunes, although the theme for his Introduction and Allegro for String Orchestra (1905) was based on a song he had overheard while staying in Wales. Younger composers, however, drew upon folk song to provide the basis for orchestral and other works: Vaughan Williams’s In the Fen Country (1904), Rhapsody No. 1 (1906), Six Studies in English Folk Song (1926), Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus (1939) and the opera Hugh the Drover (1924); Gustav Holst’s Songs of the West (1906), A Somerset Rhapsody (1907), Phantasy Quartet on British Folksongs (1916) and At the Boar’s Head (1925); Frederick Delius’s Brigg Fair (1908); George Butterworth’s Two English Idylls (1911) and The Banks of Green Willow (1913); Percy Grainger’s Green Bushes: Passacaglia on an English Folksong (1906) and Lincolnshire Posy (1937); E.J. Moeran’s Rhapsody No. 2 (1924).

  It may also be no coincidence that in the years before the First World War there was a vogue for setting to music poems that celebrated country walking. Engel’s suggestion that composers should set off into the English countryside in search of folk music in remote hamlets and villages had been taken seriously, and this kind of field research often involved tramping across large tracts of rural England in order to hear elderly country folk perform songs or play tunes. Between 1901 and 1904 Vaughan Williams wrote a cycle of nine Songs of Travel setting poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s volume of the same title, describing life on the open road of the kind recommended by Edward Thomas and E.V. Lucas. Vaughan Williams’s cycle opens with ‘The Vagabond’ and ends with ‘I have trodden the upward and the downward slope’, and in between there is a celebration of sleeping under the stars, roadside fires, birdsong, sunsets and infinite shining heavens. Ernest Farrar’s Vagabond Songs (1911) comprises settings of Arthur Symons’s ‘The Wanderer’s Song’ (‘Give me a long white road, and the grey wide path of the sea, / And the wind’s will and the bird’s will, and the heart-ache still in me’), D.G. Rossetti’s ‘Silent Noon’, in which two lovers lie hidden in grass on a languid English summer’s day, and Stevenson’s ‘The Roadside Fire’, which Vaughan Williams had also set in his Songs of Travel. In 1912 came John Ireland’s Songs of a Wayfarer, eclectically setting poems by William Blake, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Ernest Dowson and James Villa Blake (1842–1925), a Unitarian minister from Chicago who is chiefly known in Britain because Ireland went on to set further poems by him about woodland, birdsong and shepherd boys. Like the cycles by Vaughan Williams and Farrar, Songs of a Wayfarer embraces life on the road beside streams, along footpaths and over stiles.

  Severnside

  Edward Elgar had emerged as the beacon of the English Musical Renaissance and was already closely associated with the landscape in which he lived and wrote. Elgar’s music would come to represent two kinds of Englishness: mass flag-waving and solitary introspection. His most popular work remains ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, a patriotic song for which words were written by Housman’s Cambridge colleague A.C. Benson to fit music taken from the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 (1901). Sung with varying degrees of competence and rowdiness at the Last Night of the Proms, Conservative Party conferences and assorted sporting events, the rousing chorus has become an alternative national anthem. The suggestion that the tune could be the basis of a song was made by Edward VII, but Elgar was dismayed by the result. Such works as The Banner of St George (1897), the Coronation Ode (1902), the Crown of India Suite (1912) and The Spirit of England (1916) nevertheless suggested a composer who was highly skilled at evoking imperial self-confidence, and in 1916 The Times would comment that ‘Since the war began Elgar, more than ever before, has been regarded by the British people as their musical laureate.’ More genuinely characteristic of Elgar’s work, however, are pieces that are meditative and melancholy – such as parts of the Enigma Variations, the Introduction and Allegro for Strings, and the concertos for violin (1910) and cello (1919). Elgar may have written an overture inspired by and named after Froissart, the historian of chivalry from whom Shakespeare borrowed many details for his history plays, but it should be remembered that it was Froissart who first noted that the English take their pleasures sadly – an observation that, as we have seen, was used in an early review of A Shropshire Lad. Elgar himself summed up the contradictory elements of his work when he wrote in his sixties: ‘I am still at heart the dreamy child who used to be found in the reeds by Severn side with a sheet of paper trying to fix the sounds and longing for something very great.’

  The lands around the River Severn are strongly identified not only with both Elgar and Housman but with the English Musical Renaissance more generally. Rising in the Cambrian Mountains of mid-Wales, the river flows through the English counties of Shropshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, eventually discharging into the Bristol Channel. Gloucestershire in particular was a county in which a number of English composers were born or spent time: Hubert Parry’s family were the squires of Highnam Court, just outside Gloucester; Vaughan Williams was born in the Cotswold village of Down Ampney, the name of which he gave to the tune he composed for the hymn ‘Come Down, O Love Divine’; Gustav Holst and C.W. Orr were born in Cheltenham, Herbert Howells in Lydney and Ivor Gurney in Gloucester; Gerald Finzi spent a formative period during the 1920s living at Painswick, where he wrote his Severn Rhapsody (1924). All of them except Parry and Holst would set poems from A Shropshire Lad.

  Like that of Housman’s poetry, the ‘Englishness’ of Elgar’s music was seen to be closely bound up with a very particular and localised English landscape. A ‘biographical sketch’ of Elgar in the Musical Times in October 1900 begins by imagining a ‘quiet stroll’ on the Malvern Hills, ‘greatly enhanced by the companionship of one who habitually thinks his thoughts and draws his inspirations from these elevated surroundings’. And it is not only Elgar’s surroundings that are elevated in the article. The composer had always been regarded as an outsider
. He was Roman Catholic, his father had been a shopkeeper and his mother the daughter of a farm labourer, and he was largely self-taught, attending neither the Royal Academy of Music nor the Royal College of Music. These sorts of things mattered to the snobbish Victorian musical establishment, but now that Elgar had achieved such eminence (he would be knighted in 1904 and in 1911 became the first musician to be appointed to the Order of Merit) things looked rather different. The principal career of Elgar’s father was skilfully glossed over in the article; instead William Elgar had been ‘an assistant in the music-publishing house of Messrs. Coventry and Hollier, then in Dean Street, Soho’ before starting ‘a music-selling business of his own’ – though he was ‘much more of a musician than a business man’. The lowly agricultural working-class origins of Elgar’s mother were similarly enhanced when she was described as ‘descended from a fine old yeoman stock of Weston, Herefordshire, and therefore intensely English’.

  Intense Englishness, with its reach back into the distant past, now mattered in music. The article was even prefaced with the opening lines of William Langland’s fourteenth-century allegorical poem, Piers Plowman, in which a narrator called Will falls asleep on the Malvern Hills and sees, in a dream-vision, the eponymous agricultural labourer offer to show a group of pilgrims the way to Truth just as soon as he has finished ploughing his half-acre of land. The first standard edition of the poem had appeared in 1886, edited by W.W. Skeat, who described Will as ‘worthy to be honoured by all who prize highly the English character and our own land’. Skeat does not attach a great deal of importance to the Malvern Hills setting of the poem, since much of the narrative is in fact set among the streets and taverns of London (and is the direct inspiration for Elgar’s Cockaigne overture of 1901); but he also quotes Henry Hart Milman, who in his History of Latin Christianity (1854–5) noted that although Will has spent some years in the capital, ‘his home, his heart is among the poor rural population of central Mercian England’ – people like Elgar’s maternal family and the hapless agricultural labourers of Housman’s poetry.