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
