Book description
This collection is filled with songs that tell of the pleasures and
pains of love, the patterns of the countryside and the lives of
ordinary people. Here are unfaithful soldiers, ghostly lovers, whalers
on stormy seas, cuckolds and tricksters. By turns funny,
plain-speaking and melancholic, these songs evoke a lost world and,
with their melodies provided, record a vital musical tradition.
Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English
countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too. It has provoked a
huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and
people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are
travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long
tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the
countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's
relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the
countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was one of England's
greatest composers, and among the first people to travel the
countryside to collect folk songs and preserve them for future
generations.
A. L. Lloyd (1908-1982), usually known as Bert, was a folk
singer and folklorist who grew up listening to his mother singing
gypsy songs, and eventually wrote them down. Together with Vaughan
Williams, he helped rescue traditional English music from extinction.
