Off The Record
Traditional English folk songs capture long-gone summers for Alan Crosby
Folk songs capture long-gone summers for Alan Crosby
The composer and folk-song collector Ralph Vaughan Williams was in Somerset in 1904, searching for material. At West Harptree, in the Mendip Hills, he heard local farmer William King singing one of the most beautiful of all English folk songs, celebrating summer including the rustic tasks and pleasurable leisure of long days and warm weather. Its lyrics are charming, its tune haunting and evocative. There are numerous versions, but this is the best-known, the one that Vaughan Williams heard almost 120 years ago: “It’s a rosebud in June and the violets in full bloom / And the small birds are singing love songs on each spray / We’ll pipe and we’ll sing love / We’ll dance in a ring love / When each lad takes his lass / All on the green grass / And it’s oh to plough where the fat oxen graze low / And the lads and the lasses do sheep shearing go.”
Half a generation older than Vaughan Williams was the poet AE Housman, whose A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896, inspired numerous composers (including Vaughan Williams). Before and during the First World War they set his words to music, often lamenting the vanished innocence of youth and a deep and bittersweet nostalgia for that “lost content”, the summer having long gone. Housman’s poems echo much of the work of folklore collectors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They contrast the simple messages of peace, innocence, love, youth and time-honoured tradition with the harshness of the machine age and the looming shadow of war.
So William King’s song conjures up images of a seemingly more golden world before the darkness fell, a world of gentleness and togetherness and young people out in the fields engaging in honest toil. It also reveals a sense of understanding nature – those references to roses, violets and songbirds, and the farm animals grazing in the green fields.
Another celebrated folk song reflects the same images, of summer light and flowers: “As I walked out on a midsummer’s morning / For to view the fields and to take the air / Down by the banks of the sweet primroses / There I beheld a most lovely fair.”
In that one, though, there’s a twist – the lovely maiden by the flowers is grieving. The young man asks her why and she tells him: “Stand off, stand off, you’re a false deceiver / You are a false deceitful man, I know / ’ Tis you that has caused my poor heart to wander / And to give me comfort is all in vain.” We never learn what the young man has done, although we can guess!
It’s impossible to say how old these songs are. Many of them, like the two quoted here, certainly go back in different versions at least a century before Vaughan Williams and his friends collected them. Some have many variations, and there are numerous different tunes. Broadsides and ballad sheets recorded versions of some, but others were passed on purely by oral tradition.
I think about all those rural ancestors, the ‘ag labs’, the farm girls, the young shepherds and the dairymaids. Summer meant hard work but also dalliance and flirting, cornfields and haystacks, long evenings and strolls along quiet lanes.
And I wonder how many “false deceivers” there were – how much those summer evenings were times for changing your mind, eyeing up the other opportunities, hedging your bets, giving in to other temptations, seeing other fruit ripe for the picking. We know the results: those hasty weddings in the late autumn and early winter, those baptisms in February and March, and the women who were left alone with an illegitimate baby to face poverty and social rejection. Oh, those rosebuds and violets and primroses had much to answer for!
‘King’s song reveals a sense of understanding nature’