Ralph Vaughan Williams around 1900. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Ingrave, Essex, 4 December 1903. The Heatley sisters, daughters of the vicar, have organised a tea at the vicarage to introduce a young composer from London to the villagers who can still sing the old songs. Among them is Charles Pottipher, a farm labourer, seventy years old. He sings Bushes and Briars, a love song in the Aeolian mode, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, thirty-one, with studies at the Royal College of Music and at Cambridge behind him and a few months in Berlin with Max Bruch, tries to write it down in his notebook. He cannot quite manage. He will note that the free rhythm and the subtle portamenti of that melody cannot be reproduced in ordinary notation. Of that evening he will also recount something else: the impression of recognising a music he had always known.
From then on, for about ten years, Vaughan Williams returns to the field whenever he can. The final count exceeds eight hundred songs, to which are added singing games and dance tunes, collected in twenty-one English counties; Essex, Norfolk, Herefordshire and Sussex alone yield more than two thirds of them. Almost everything is taken down by hand, in pencil, with very few recordings on phonograph cylinder. In January 1905 he is at King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, in the harbour district where the fishermen live, and comes back with The Captain’s Apprentice, A Basket of Eggs, On Board a Ninety-eight, Ward, the Pirate. The following year, on 23 August 1906, Henry Wood conducts the first Norfolk Rhapsody, built on those songs.
The method had its limits, and folk scholars have said so without ceremony. Vaughan Williams sought the melodies more than the words, and the song interested him more than the person singing it: of many pieces he transcribed only the first verse. The historian of folk song Roy Palmer has observed this precisely. Bushes and Briars itself reached the public with its verses completed from a broadside printed in London, in the Seven Dials district, and not from Pottipher’s voice.
But the point was not preservation. Vaughan Williams had studied with Bruch, would soon go to Ravel in Paris, and knew perfectly well that English art music of the nineteenth century spoke with a German accent. In the songs of the farm labourers he found a grammar that no conservatory taught: modal scales that do not lean towards the dominant, phrases that breathe according to the words and not the bar line, cadences that close on an unexpected degree. He did not quote it, he learned it. When in 1906 he edited the music of the English Hymnal, he fitted several folk melodies, collected by himself and by others, to hymn texts, and so tunes born in villages entered churches across the country. In the symphonies of his maturity the songs are almost never recognisable, but their way of moving is everywhere.
There is in this story a kind of debt that art music rarely admits. The composer whom England considers the father of its twentieth-century music learned to speak by listening to farm labourers, fishermen and country women who almost never could read a note. His work was to put them on paper before they vanished, and paper, as he himself noted of Pottipher, was not enough.
The Great War closed the season of collecting. The notebooks are today in the British Library. When Vaughan Williams died, on 26 August 1958, he was president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.