Going to a nativity play, carol concert or church service this Christmas? Then you can almost guarantee that O Little Town of Bethlehem will be scheduled for lusty congregational singing. Its tune feels as old as time, and in many ways it is, but we might never have known it – and a host of other seasonal melodies – without the dedicated research of early-20th century folk-song collectors such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Cecil Sharp and Ella Mary Leather.
It was urgent work. The sweeping social changes caused by the industrial revolution in the 19th century had decimated the folk culture of the British countryside. Vaughan Williams and his colleagues recognised that “every day some old village singer dies and with him half a dozen beautiful melodies are lost to the world for ever. If we are to preserve what remains we must set about it at once.”
Consequently, from 1903 onwards, Vaughan Williams began collecting folksongs – eventually gathering around 800. In that first year, a Mr Garman sang him The Ploughboy’s Dream in the village of Ockley, near the composer’s family home at Leith Hill, Surrey. The tune went straight into his notebook, and when the next year he was appointed editor of The English Hymnal, it reappeared, harmonised and named “Forest Green”. It was set to verses by Phillips Brooks, a mid-19th century Episcopalian preacher from New England, entitled O Little Town of Bethlehem. (Vaughan Williams got a little muddled here: it was his custom to name tunes after their village of origin, but Forest Green is a hamlet a couple of miles away from Ockley.)
Try singing the first verse of The Ploughboy’s Dream and see how the tune fits:
I am a ploughboy stout and strong as ever drove a team,
And three years since as I lay abed I had a dreadful dream,
I thought I drove my master’s team both Dobbin, Belle and Star,
Before a stiff and armoured plough as all my master’s are.
The song goes on to give a clear warning to ploughboys to treat their horses well or face dire consequences – sentiments not unusual in folk songs and carols, as Vaughan Williams noted. Their preoccupation with crude punishment or hard manual labour meant they were often unsuitable to be lifted into a hymnal, but their tunes, on the other hand, deserved to be preserved.
So, for instance, a sea shanty entitled Our Captain Cried All Hands, which he heard at Monk’s Gate in West Sussex, made a perfect, stirring melody for He Who Would Valiant Be. Similarly, the tune “Kingsfold” (I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say)started life as the altogether more macabre Murder of Maria Marten. He wanted good tunes for people to sing, and wrote: “It ought no longer to be true anywhere that the most exalted moment of a churchgoer’s week will be encumbered with music which would not be tolerated in secular entertainment.”
Another beautiful melody rescued from oblivion, harmonised and fed into the musical life of the season was The Truth Sent from Above, sung by a Mr W Jenkins at King’s Pyon, Herefordshire in July 1909. It was collected with help from folklorist Ella Mary Leather, responsible for rescuing a series of tunes from Gypsy hop pickers and others, using a phonograph. The Truth Sent From Above was first published in the Folk-Song Society Journal in 1909 and used in 1912 by Vaughan Williams to open his extremely popular Fantasia on Christmas Carols of 1912. Vaughan Williams’ friend, fellow composer Gerald Finzi, also used the tune to set words by George Herbert in his 1925 choral work The Brightness of This Day.
Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Christmas Carols performed by the London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus.
Cecil Sharp, who died 100 years ago this year, was equally active, sometimes finding alternative tunes to similar text. He found another melody for The Truth Sent from Above, sung to him by Seth Vandrell and Samuel Bradley of Donnington Wood, Shropshire, and published in his 1911 English Folk Carols, a collection of 21 melodies and texts found in Worcestershire, Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Kent. His collection includes variants on well-known carols, pointing up the intensely regional nature of music-making before transcribing and recording standardised so many tunes we now accept as traditional. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen is an example. The version we sing today originated in Cambridgeshire, but Sharp found variants in Warwickshire and even within Cambridgeshire itself.
Sometimes, several sources were involved before a version was devised. The Holly and the Ivy, for instance, was heard by Sharp in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, sung by a Mrs Mary Clayton, but the words we sing today were collected from a Mrs Wyatt of East Harptree, Somerset, and ostensibly gleaned from broadsides printed decades earlier but held in collective memory.
Vaughan Williams believed: “National music should represent the people. Music is the expression of the soul of the nation. The same circumstances that produced our beautiful folk songs also produced our history, our customs, our incomparable landscapes; perhaps even, may I add, our independable [sic] weather and our abominable food.” That wry observation saw him slip 30 folk tunes into the English Hymnal, ensuring that what was once intensely local music became part of the national consciousness.
Not all of the dozens of carols collected by Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp found favour, though. Crude theology and bucolic descriptions of retribution often made them unsuitable for church services. One such example is On Christmas Day, noted down by Vaughan Williams in September 1912 from Gypsy singers near Weobley in Herefordshire. A farmer who takes his plough out into the fields is met by Christ, who rebukes him for working on Christmas Day. Before he can repent, the ground opens beneath the farmer and swallows him up. His family and even his livestock are punished. It’s hardly Oh Little One Sweet, Oh Little One Mild.
This gruesome tale was included in a volume entitled Twelve Traditional Carols from Herefordshire, published by Ella Mary Leather and Vaughan Williams in 1920 (in solo and four-part versions). Another questionable carol from Weobley was There is a Fountain of Christ’s Blood. Vaughan Williams loved the tune and incorporated it (like The Truth Sent from Above) into his Fantasia on Christmas Carols, but he thought the words represented “rather unpleasant imagery which is characteristic of much of 18th century evangelistic verse”. Instead, he and Mrs Leather took words from a 17th-century carol and renamed it Joseph and Mary.
If you want to hear these Herefordshire curiosities, baritone Derek Welton and pianist Iain Burnside recorded them in 2011. This winter, those recordings reappeared alongside the four-part versions, newly-recorded by the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, under William Vann (Carols from Herefordshire, Albion Records).
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen cropped up again in Herefordshire, this time sung by sisters Elizabeth Johnson and Esther Smith at a farm called The Homme in Dilwyn. While their words were similar to versions found in other parts of the country, their tune was entirely different. And curiously it was in Herefordshire, not Gloucestershire, that Vaughan Williams first heard The Gloucestershire Wassail Song. An unknown singer in the village of Pembridge sang the seasonal drinking song to Vaughan Williams amid the summer heat of August 1909, and he published it in a 1913 collection of folk songs. He also made an arrangement for The Oxford Book of Carols in 1928 and included it in his 1949 cantata Folk Songs of the Four Seasons.
“Wassail” originates from Anglo-Saxon “be thou hale”. Here’s wishing you a hale and hearty Christmas, one where you might sing carols that could have disappeared altogether – without the dogged determination of a band of folk-song rescuers who trod the rural byways of Edwardian England in search of its musical essence.