![]() ![]() It’s harder to know how old these songs actually are – the best Roud can do is tell us when they were first jotted down or printed, something rather different – but here too his index is vast in scope. Variations of one song, The Lowlands of Holland, were once known at Axford in Hampshire, Perth in Scotland, and across the Atlantic in Maine and Tennessee, alongside dozens of other places. Between migration and colonisation, slavery and settlement, anglophone culture has swept the planet. This thematic spread is matched by geography. There are songs about Bonnie Prince Charlie, and finding solace in death, and one, Hares on the Mountain, where the singer decides to forget male advances and “attend to my schooling” instead. There are war songs and love songs and songs about cattle and mining and bar-room cheats in the East End. Spend time exploring Roud’s index and this scale can be almost overwhelming. Roud himself says his database now boasts about 25,000 tunes, painstakingly gathered from newspaper archives, magazines and songbooks, to say nothing of past collectors and fellow “nerds” online. “It’s huge,” says Dr Fay Hield, a folk musician and ethnomusicologist at the University of Sheffield. But speak to experts in the field and what really makes Roud’s index special is its colossal scale. When possible, he provides digital scans of song sheets, avoiding the habit of purging lyrics that older collectors considered rude or inappropriate. Unlike earlier collectors, he dispassionately notes songs referenced in other sources. But in vital ways, Roud’s work is different. For one thing, it incorporates the efforts of Francis James Child, an American collector who amassed more than 300 ballads in the late 19th century. Up to a point, the Roud Folk Song Index fits into this older tradition. These early English collectors, for their part, were shadowed by colleagues across Britain and Ireland, and in the New World.Įarly collector of folk music … composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. The songs Vaughan Williams heard there may have influenced some of his most famous compositions, appropriate for a man who once called music “the expression of the soul of a nation”. Visiting King’s Lynn, in 1905, Vaughan Williams spent time at the Tilden Smith, a pub where local fishers were sheltering from January storms. Musicians both, Williams and Sharp also wanted folk melodies to inform English classical music, just as Sibelius did in Finland or Antonín Dvořák in Bohemia. In the years before the first world war, enthusiasts such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp scoured country lanes and village inns for people to record, worried that industrialisation and urban life would soon wash traditional tunes away. ![]() P eople have systematically collected traditional English music for more than a century. In its size and ambition, Roud’s project speaks to the challenges of constraining such a varied tradition – and even to deciding what folk music actually is. ![]() The index has become indispensable for folk fans worldwide, bolstering genealogy projects and inspiring musicians. Including hundreds of thousands of references to tens of thousands of songs, Roud’s work spans the anglophone oral tradition, taking in English villages, Appalachian hilltops and harbours in the Caribbean. The result, the product of 52 years of effort, is the Roud Folk Song Index. As he grew up, armed with proper training and new technology, Roud took to collating this bounty in earnest, hunting down leads and developing an elegant method to trace a song’s heritage. Even as a teenager, Roud had been fascinated by folk music – how across the centuries, dozens of voices could send songs shooting countless different ways, their titles and lyrics shifting even as their cores remained the same. His infatuation with indexing would persist too, those shoe boxes finally swelling into something remarkable. Soon enough, Roud would become one for real, working much of his career for the London borough of Croydon. ![]() “Without knowing it,” he says, “I was becoming a librarian.” He soon realised his hobby was turning into something more. He used old shoe boxes as a primitive filing system and wrote the titles on 5x3 inch record cards that his mum bought him once a week. Not content with just listening to LPs, Roud began indexing them – his own and ones he found mentioned in newspapers and magazines. Hardly unusual for a child of the 1950s – but this boy from south London was different. W hen Steve Roud was young, he began collecting records. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |