Folk music is notoriously difficult to define, and is not simply oral tradition, as recent research has shown.
By Sue Allan
Once upon a time, I was a keen amateur folk performer passionate about finding and reviving local songs, tunes and dances. In more recent years, I’ve focused more on researching and writing about this treasury of Cumbrian music, and believe that Cumbria’s folk music tradition is distinctive, even unique.
The cultural landscape of the Lake District was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017, but music gets no mention as a part of that culture. Northern English folk songs tend to be thought of as those of Lancashire cotton weavers or colliers and fishermen in the northeast. Our regional songs, tunes and dances always seem under the radar: a hidden heritage ripe for the picking, if you know where to look.
Folk music is notoriously difficult to define, and is not simply oral tradition, as recent research has shown. It is essentially music with a history, shaped by people over time. As folk song scholar Steve Roud is wont to say: ‘it’s not the origin of a song which makes it “folk”, but what the folk do with it.’
And what folk in Cumbria did with their songs is sing them – at Christmastide ‘merry neets’, at fairs, in town and country inns, at harvest suppers, sheep clippings, shepherds’ meets, hunt suppers and, of course, at home. My research uncovered over 500 songs in many different versions, and that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. And with a quarter of folk songs in Cumbria being in dialect and around a third hunting songs, our county’s traditional folk song repertoire is quite distinctive.
Hunting songs
Hunting songs have a pedigree that goes back to the late 18th century, and many local ones have been written since then. The six fell packs – the Blencathra, Ullswater, Melbreak, Eskdale and Ennerdale, Coniston and Lunesdale Foxhounds – hunted on foot in the Lakeland fells and still go out following trails and exercising hounds. Their songs were popular in the Lake District for over 150 years, written to celebrate notable hunts, hounds, huntsmen and even foxes. Set to a fairly limited repertoire of tunes, they often feature rousing choruses and were sung at singsongs after hunt suppers, at shepherds’ meets and singing contests at country shows.
The most famous Cumbrian song is ‘D’Ye Ken John Peel’, about the eponymous huntsman who lived and worked ‘Back o’Skiddaw’ and is buried at Caldbeck. It used to be popular nationwide, but today few people know anything about him or his song, which is no longer sung in schools, and fox hunting is of course now illegal, so even folk club singers eschew its songs.
Peel himself was a small-time farmer and horse dealer for whom fox hunting was part of his livelihood, and always his passion. Born near Caldbeck in 1777, he lived most of his life at Ruthwaite, near Ireby, and by the time he died in 1854, he’d become something of a local legend. That he went on to become known nationwide was down to the song written about him by his friend, John Woodcock Graves. Many years later, Graves related the story of its composition around 1832 in his house at Caldbeck, exclaiming: ‘By Jove, Peel, you’ll be sung when we’re both run to earth!’. He was right, of course – although my great-grandmother, who married a Peel, didn’t approve, declaring John Peel ‘nobbut an owd drunkard.’
By 1840, the song words were in print in a Newcastle-printed chapbook and the tune is found in a musician’s manuscript tune book. Then in 1866, it was published in Sidney Gilpin’s Songs of Cumberland and the Lake Country and, two years later, Carlisle singer William Metcalfe arranged it for concert performance, singing it at an event in London in 1869. ‘D’Ye Ken John Peel’ went on to achieve even wider popularity after it appeared in the National Song Book, which went into widespread use in schools and homes over the next 50 years. Meanwhile, back home in Cumberland, regional patriotism ensured that the song continued to be sung at social events, with a particularly fine version by tweed salesman, mole-catcher and keen singer, Micky Moscrop, featuring on some 1953 archive recordings.
The Edwardian folk song collectors
People are often surprised that some of the famous folk song collectors of the Edwardian period visited Cumbria in search of songs, including such luminaries as Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger, as well as lesser-known women musicians, Mary
Wakefield of Sedgwick, near Kendal, and Anne Gilchrist from Lancashire.
Cecil Sharp and Leeds antiquarian and collector, Frank Kidson, both attended the Westmorland Music Festival, founded by Wakefield, to judge the Folk-Song Competition, which was instigated in the hopes of finding local songs. The competition ran from 1902 to 1906 and some of the songs performed in the competition went on to be published in the Folk-Song Society’s journal, including ‘My Bonny Boy’, ‘Poor Old Horse’ and ‘Walney Cockfighting Song’. This latter was sung by one of the few working-class singers in the competition, Kirkby Lonsdale blacksmith, John Collinson, who both Anne Gilchrist and Percy Grainger collected from a few years later, and Gilchrist also heard and transcribed songs from 88-year-old Mrs Carlisle and 70-year-old James Bayliff, both of Barbon.
The composer and keen folk song collector, Vaughan Williams, also visited the county, first of all in 1904 when he collected some tunes and the lovely song ‘Tarry Woo’ (Wool)’ from John Mason of Dent. Then in 1906 he went to Carlisle, probably at the invitation of Cathedral Organist, Sydney Nicholson, and noted down from a Mr Carruthers of Wigton a number of Robert Anderson’s Cumberland ballads.
The Cumberland Bard Robert Anderson and his songs
Cumbria has a fine tradition of published dialect poetry going back into the 18th century and peaking in the early years of the 19th century. The dialect poets most notable for writing songs are Susanna Blamire of Thackwood, near Dalston (albeit more often writing in Scots than Cumbrian), and Robert Anderson of Carlisle – ‘The Cumberland Bard’.
Born 1770 in Carlisle, Anderson had a very basic education but was an autodidact with both artistic and musical talents. In 1783, he became an apprentice pattern drawer in the local calico printing industry and, in 1794, went to work in London. Attending the famous pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, and unimpressed by the songs performed there in the popular mock pastoral Scottish style, he declared he could write better himself. The first of his songs was ‘Lucy Gray of Allendale’ which, like many of his subsequent ones, was set to music by James Hook and performed regularly. Most Vauxhall Gardens songs were rapidly pirated, going into print in cheap chapbooks and sold countrywide, but provided no income for their writer.
After a few years, Anderson returned home to tend his sick father, and published his first poetry collection, in Standard English, in 1798. The book did not sell well but, encouraged by friends, his Ballads in the Cumberland Dialect in 1805 had rather more success, albeit not enough to keep him from poverty. Anderson died in 1833 and seems to have been more honoured in death than in life: with a memorial to him erected in Carlisle Cathedral, his Cumberland Ballads going into numerous editions that century, while his most popular dialect songs like ‘Sally Gray’, ‘Bleckell Murry Neet’ (‘Blackwell Merry Night’) and ‘Canny Aul Cummerlan’’ went on being sung well into the 20th century.
Ballads in print
Many folk songs were circulated in cheaply printed ballad sheets and small chapbook collections of songs called ‘garlands’. Cumberland was a major centre of chapbook production, especially by the printers of Penrith and Whitehaven with these little books and ballad slips bought by people of every class from itinerant hawkers at country fairs and hiring fairs.
We know far more about these ballads than we do about the ballad-mongers who sold and sang them, who usually just appear in press and court reports, invariably depicted as rogues and vagabonds. However, we know a little more about them in Cumbria thanks to the personal memoirs of Joseph ‘Putty Joe’ Hodgson (1810–95) of Whitehaven, who toured much of England and Scotland hawking ‘10d to 14d or 1s 6d worth of small wares, such as needles and pins, stay-laces, and a few ballads,’ and Jimmy Dyer (1841–1903) of Carlisle.
Here’s Jimmy Dyer, the man we all admire
Here is Jimmy Dyer, of him we never tire
He plays his fiddle in the street
He does the best he can
We all are highly fond of him,
He’s a Carlisle gentleman.
Jimmy is particularly well-known because of the bronze statue of him in Carlisle’s Lanes shopping centre. Better known for his fiddle playing than his ballads, Jimmy published The Life and Times of Jimmy Dyer in 1870, in which he relates how he ran away to sea but, not taking kindly to drill and hard work, managed to play the fool sufficiently well to get a discharge. He declared he had early in life been ‘struck with the idea that none but mere fools tried to get rich by manual labour’, there being ‘150,000 ways of making a living without descending to earning it by the sweat of my brow’. So once back in Carlisle, he bought a fiddle and a stock of ballads and soon no Cumberland fair or market was complete without the sight and sound of Jimmy scraping away at his fiddle, singing, and peddling his wares. Sadly, he ended his days in Carlisle workhouse in 1903.
Traditional songs in the 20th century
The BBC recorded a number of folk singers in the county: in 1940 the first programme in a radio series for the BBC Forces Programme called Thirsty Work was recorded at the Royal Oak in Ambleside, featuring local working men performing songs including ‘All Jolly Fellows who Follow the Plough’, Anderson’s ‘Sally Gray’ and popular Lakeland hunting songs ‘Joe Bowman’ (about a famous Ullswater huntsman) and the inevitable ‘John Peel’. Then, in the 1950s and early 1960s, the BBC Northern Service broadcast folk music from Cumbria featuring, amongst others, Carlisle singers Joe Wallace, who later recorded an LP, Lakeland and Border Songs, and Robert Forrester.
Forrester and his friend, Norman Alford, along with Carlisle librarian, Tom Gray, went on to initiate a project in 1953 to record singers in two country pubs near Carlisle: The Plough Inn at Wreay and The Crown and Thistle at Rockcliffe. The original acetate records were lodged in the county archives, and commercial LP and CD Pass the Jug Round produced many years later. Many of the songs performed were hunting songs, including the title track and Micky Moscrop’s wonderful rendition of ‘John Peel’, but other stand-out songs were the haunting ‘Copshawholm Fair’ and ‘Corby Castle’, both sung by Bob Forrester.
Today, singers like Maddy Prior, Mike Willoughby, Dave Camlin and Denis Westmorland are still performing and re-interpreting the old songs, and many more are also writing new songs about Cumbria – perhaps the folk songs of the future?
Cumbria’s rich heritage of folk song and dialect is, then, as much a part of our region’s story as the writings of the Lake Poets, and deserves to be much better known. These songs are an important part of our regional identity, which first found its voice through songs like those of Robert Anderson, whose ‘Canny Aul Cummerlan’ still strikes a chord today:
Yer buik-larn’d wise gentry, that seen monie counties,
May preach and palaver, and brag as they will
O’ mountains, lakes, valleys, woods, watters and meadows,
But canny auld Cummerlan’ caps them aw still.
The Cumberland Bard: Robert Anderson of Carlisle is available from Bookends in Carlisle and Keswick, or online at bookscumbria.com/product/cumbrian-books/arts-and-literature/performing-S
Pass the Jug Round album of archive recordings is available as a download from: veterantapes.bandcamp.com/album/pass-the-jug-round
Some free-to-read articles, book chapters and presentations on Cumbrian folk music, and Sue’s PhD thesis on folk song in Cumbria, are on Academia.edu: independent.academia.edu/SueAllan1