Henry Burstow - Folksongs

Folksongs

Burstow writes that he knew 420 songs. He kept a list of them, which he gives at the end of his book. Eighty-two of these were learnt from his father (marked with an asterisk in the list). Others came from his mother or from friends, sometimes exchanged for another song or a pint of beer. The remainder came from ballad sheets. In his enthusiasm, he himself pursued songs very much as a collector:

He once set his heart upon learning a very long ballad "off" a fellow bell-ringer, a ploughman in a neighbouring village. The ploughman declined to sing it …, saying, "No, you wants to laugh at my burr!" … So Mr. Burstow plotted. He induced a friend to lure the ploughman into the front parlour of a tavern, himself hiding in the back room. After a time Mr. Burstow's accomplice challenged the ploughman to sing as long a "ballet" as himself. A duel of songs arose; the ballads grew and grew in length. At last the ploughman, filled with desire to "go one verse better" than his opponent, burst out into the very song for which the bell-ringer was patiently waiting. He learned it then and there!

In 1892 or 1893, Burstow wrote to the folksong collector Lucy Broadwood and she collected a large number of songs from him, so that his is the major contribution to her English Traditional Songs and Carols (London, 1908). Broadwood also suggested Burstow as a source to Ralph Vaughan Williams, who collected several songs, some with a phonograph, of which Burstow writes:

This was the first time I had seen or heard one of these marvellous machines, and I was amazed beyond expression to hear my own songs thus repeated in my own voice.

Burstow's repertoire contained many folksongs as understood by the collectors of the time, but also much unwanted material from known and published composers and from relatively recent broadside ballads. Broadwood's account of folksong collecting gives a picture of this poor fit:

We must listen with becoming reverence to "Silver Threads amongst the Golden," to Eliza Cook's "Old Armchair," or to "Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt"; we must wag our pencil hypocritically over our music-paper should we wish later to hear the ballad of "Long Lamkin," "Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor," "Death and the Lady," or the like. And we must never take for granted that a dirge on Napoleon, or the lamentation of a convict hanged a few years ago, can be skipped, for modern doggerel is often wedded to the oldest tunes.

For comparison, Burstow's list begins with five ballads on Napoleon and includes "John Lawrence" (presumably the "Last Dying Confession" of John Lawrence, hanged at Horsham in 1844), "Ben Bolt" and "Silver Threads Among the Gold".