Green Bushes is an English folk song (Roud #1040, Laws P2) which is featured in the second movement of Ralph Vaughan Williams' English Folk Song Suite, in Percy Grainger's Green Bushes (Passacaglia on an English Folksong), and in George Butterworth's The Banks of Green Willow. The melody is very similar to that of the Lost Lady Found movement of Percy Grainger's Lincolnshire Posy, and to The Cutty Wren.
According to Roud and Bishop
"This was an immensely popular song, collected many times across England, although not so often elsewhere. It was also very popular with nineteenth-century broadside printers."
The song first appears in broadsides of the 1820s or 1830s. Its popularity was hugely increased by a popular melodrama The Green Bushes, or A Hundred Years Ago by William Buckstone, first performed in 1845. The heroine of the play made repeated reference to the song and sang a few verses, with the result that the sheet music was published soon after.
Read more about Green Bushes: Lyrics
Famous quotes containing the words green and/or bushes:
“O Paddy dear, an’ did ye hear the news that’s goin’ round?
The shamrock is by law forbid to grow on Irish ground!
No more Saint Patrick’s Day we’ll keep, his colour can’t be seen,
For there’s a cruel law agin the wearin’ o’ the Green!”
—Unknown. The Wearing of the Green (l. 37–40)
“Strong currents drag many stones and bushes along with them, strong intellects many dense and muddled minds.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)