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NURSERY rhymes and FOLK songs

In 1877, Marianne Harriet Mason published Nursery Rhymes and Country Songs, a collection of songs obtained orally from her family and from people around her. She was in contact with several of the early folk song collectors and was a friend of both Sabine Baring-Gould and Lucy Broadwood. As well as being the first woman to collect and publish traditional songs, she was a pioneer in many other ways. This article looks at her life, her song collection, and her part in the Victorian folk song revival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FOLK songs, FRIENDSHIP, HYMN writers, and HISTORY

The name of Cecil Sharp and his position as a collector of and advocate for folk song is well known to a large section of the public, and the centenary of his first folk song collecting was marked by a number of events and publications in August 2003. That of Sabine Baring-Gould is, generally, less familiar, at least as a collector of folk songs, although many people might know of him as the author of the hymn 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' or through his other work as novelist, antiquarian, hagiographer, and travel writer. Sharp was twenty-five years younger than Baring-Gould and began his song collecting fifteen years after Baring-Gould had started the main phase of his own work. Sharp initially sought out Baring-Gould for advice, and this led to a close collaborative relationship between 1904 and 1907. The two men met a number of times and, it is clear, had a respect for one another which was maintained, through visits and through correspondence, over several further years. Working together, they established many of the working practices for the song collectors who followed them, and had a profound influence on folk song collecting in England during the first half of the twentieth century. Their collaboration has not previously been studied in any detail, and this article seeks to explore and explain their relationship, making use of letters and papers from their manuscripts as well as other published and unpublished sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CLERGY and FOLK songs

A biography of Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, theologian, hagiographer and novelist, is presented. He was born on January 28, 1834 at Exeter in the West Country and studied at King's College in London. He then went up to Cambridge earning the degree of Bachelor of Arts then Master of Arts from Clare College. He had married Grace Taylor, a mill girl and had fifteen children. His principal achievement was the collection of folk songs that he made with the help of the ordinary people.

PUBLISHED articles, COSTUME, MORRIS dances, MORRIS dance, and HISTORY

The author describes his discovery of articles of morris dance costume at Lewtrenchard, a parish and village in Devon, England. Topics covered include his investigation of the enthusiasm of Sabine Baring-Gould, an English Anglican priest, hagiographer, antiquarian, novelist and eclectic scholar, on the promotion of morris dancing in Devon before the First World War, the early performances of morris dancing in the parish, and the history of the costumes used in the performances.

FOLK music

Although Gustav Holst never collected English folk songs himself he was very familiar with them through his friendship with Ralph Vaughan Williams and other collectors such as Cecil Sharp and William Gillies Whittaker. He used a number of them in his compositions and made several arrangements of folk songs collected by others. His first work founded on folk song was Songs of the West, based on Sabine Baring-Gould's collection of songs from Devon and Cornwall - a companion piece to Somerset Rhapsody, which was based on Sharp's collection. While Somerset Rhapsody went on to become one of Holst's better-known works, Songs of the West has been largely forgotten. Holst arranged sixteen songs from George Gardiner's Hampshire collection for the Novello series Folk Songs of England, as well as creating a number of choral arrangements of traditional songs. Through his friendship with Sharp he became a strong supporter of the English Folk Dance Society and taught at a number of their summer schools. His choral ballet The Morning of the Year introduced traditional English dances under the direction of co-producer Douglas Kennedy, and was performed in 1927 by the English Folk Dance Society in support of the Cecil Sharp Memorial Fund. This article considers Holst's engagement with English folk music, the genesis of his Songs of the West, and his wider contribution to the folk music movement in the early part of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WITCHCRAFT, FOLKLORE, MAGIC, and SCIENCE

This article retraces the process by which a feathered rope, discovered in the roof of a house in Somerset, came to be displayed as a 'Witch's Ladder' in a glass case showing 'Magic and Witchcraft' at the Pitt Rivers Museum. This 'retracing' has revealed a set of alternative associations that the feathered rope has had: with other museum objects and written documents, as well as with a range of people. Although presented in the museum as a 'matter of fact', its original function is revealed to have been a 'matter of concern', enabling this 'object' to emerge from its glass case as a 'thing' (Latour). Retracing its network and the historical process by which it became a museum object has meant engaging with the scientific ambitions of E.B. Tylor and his notions of independent corroborating evidence, as well as with the more 'folkloric' practices of literary folklore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]