The Sound of Old England

Often I wish that everyone could be invited onto Desert Island Discs.  I could listen all day to people’s lists of favourite music (not to mention the reasons for their choices and the records themselves), regardless of the guest’s prominence – regardless even of whether I have ever heard of them.

Assuming that any readers feel similarly, this scratchy recording, barely thirty seconds long, of an old man rattling out an even older song, is a strong candidate for my island:

This is the voice of a man who was born around 1832, and the song he is singing was very old even when he had been taught it as a boy.  He sings only two verses because that is all he can recall, but there is no doubt about the tune.  He has borne it in his heart for threescore years and fifteen (the recording was taken in 1906), but the August morning of his song has lost none of its freshness.  And this goes for us who hear him more than a lifetime later still.

The singer is Mr. Joseph Taylor of Saxby All Saints in Lincolnshire, a bailiff, aged seventy-five.  In many respects he was an ordinary Englishman, which of course is what is so interesting about him.  His plain north Lincolnshire voice proclaims that ordinary Englishmen of those days really did inherit tradition from the past, and not only in the self-conscious sense of a revival, but within a home-made culture alive and authentic.

Now of course this recording could not have come about without theatrics of one sort of another.  Even in those days before the Great War the traditions were endangered: the Industrial Revolution had of course stirred the kingdom up and people could suddenly move around the country with great ease.  The new and vivid geographical horizons, though a wonderful development, were also distractions from the local consciousness of history, which had to be learnt and understood.  For these and many other reasons, the folk-songs were beginning to fall not only out of use but out of mind.

We owe a great deal, then, to musicians such as Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who at the eleventh hour (the turn of the twentieth century) cycled around the countryside with sheaves of manuscript paper in search of folk-songs and their singers.  (Cecil Sharp alone collected nearly five thousand songs from Britain and North America).  Percy Grainger, though Australian by birth, was another of these.  It was to him that Joseph Taylor sang in Lincolnshire, and he who notated ‘Brigg Fair’ and other songs and recorded them — for our sake — on a cylinder phonograph.

Grainger did not see himself as a curator only, but even entered into the tradition himself.  He wrote his own arrangement of ‘Brigg Fair’, in which a faithful reprisal of the tune is underlain with his rich harmonies.  I think the best recording is sung by the inimitable King’s Singers here, but it can also be heard here and on the cello here.  (Frederick Delius’ rhapsody is also worth hearing!).

To my post-millennial ears, Grainger’s characteristic mistiness  does to his arrangement what the crackle of the phonograph does to the recording.  That is to permit the listener to hear distance (about which more here).  We ‘only just’ have the sound of Joseph Taylor’s voice, which in any case is heard across the gulf of the twentieth century, a gulf whose breadth sometimes seems unfathomable.   Out on that desert island I would not be any further away from Britain in space than we already are in time from Joseph Taylor’s England, so perhaps it is not such an odd choice after all.