Folklife Quarterly FQ 40: Jan 2014 Folklife Quarterly, web version | Page 45
‘Folklife Traditions’
FQ 40, Jan 2014, p43 v ‘Ballad Singers of the Border’, J. Kyrle Fletcher’, by Roy Palmer
I wonder if there are any ballad singers left in the country towns, or have they all gone in this age of jazz, to join the old men who wore smocks
and who wore Billy Cock hats 5 and spoke with the slow, rich speech of the border country.
I have been asked where the bulk of these ballads of the border country were printed? I have an idea that most of them were printed in Hereford,
and others at Worcester, but the ballad makers who went to the markets of the three L’s, Ledbury, Leominster, and Ludlow, had most of their ballads
printed at Hereford. One used to come across them pasted in some Commonplace Book, or Scrap Book, but such books have gone out of fashion. The
nearest one that you would be likely to meet to-day is a Photograph Album. I might, as one dwelling in a town, plead for the preservation of these
fugitive things, these ballads of bad rhyme, worse grammar, and often very indifferent morals, but they shed a certain light on the everyday life of
people on the Welsh border.
Notes by Roy Palmer
1 J. Kyrle Fletcher, who, as he tells us, spent his boyhood in Worcester, was a bookseller and antique dealer in Newport, Monmouthshire, from the
1920s until the 1960s. He wrote a number of books, including Cardiff. Notes: Picturesque and Biographical (1917), My Lord Worcester (1925) and
History of the American Theatre (1936).
2 Russia, having secured victory over the Turks in the war of 1877-1878, was on the brink of war with Britain in 1884 in a dispute concerning
territory in and to the north of Afganistan. A compromise was eventually reached.
3 The London, overloaded and unseaworthy, sank on 11 January 1864 in the Bay of Biscay during a voyage from Gravesend to Melbourne, Australia,
with the loss of the lives of 220 emigrants. On 22 January 1873, again carrying emigrants, as the Northfleet lay at anchor off Dungeness, she
was struck amidships by a Spanish vessel, the Murillo, which failed to stop. Within fifteen minutes, 320 people lost their lives. The Murillo was
arrested by the Admiralty and confiscated.
4 The story of ‘The Blind Beggar’s Daughter’ has been known since Elizabethan times, though the earliest extant ballad versions date from the
seventeenth century. The action’s transfer from Bethnal to Brummagem Green is unusual.
5 Round low-crowned felt hat.
Roy Palmer
Notes © 2014 Roy Palmer.
Roy has been involved from the 1960s in singing and seeking traditional songs ; his collection of field recordings is now in the Recorded Sound
Archive at the British Library. He has published anthologies of traditional songs and street ballads reflecting different aspects of social, military,
maritime, industrial, agricultural and recreational history, and books on the folklore of different counties, and has contributed articles to
periodicals, including FQ (see www.traditions.folklife-west.org.uk), and English Dance & Song and Folk Music Journal.
Talks, Conferences, Exhibitions
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Folklife Members:
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FLS: The Folklore Society, c/o The Warburg Institute,
Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB. www.folklore-society.com
For more information, see website or contact
[email protected]
TSF: Traditional Song Forum www.tradsong.org
EFDSS: English Folk Dance & Song Society www.efdss.org
Whilst Membership is not required for ‘Talks, Conferences & Exhibitions’,
it does help to minimise our losses; we thank Members for their support
Sat 22 Feb BROADSIDE DAY 2014
Cecil Sharp House, EFDSS, London, 10am - 5.30pm
The Broadside Day is an annual gathering of people interested in street
literature and other forms of printed material from past centuries, such
as broadsides, chapbooks, songsters, and popular engravings. The 2014
conference will include presentations on the treatment of cuckolded
husbands and unfaithful wives in broadside ballads; a historical
overview of French street literature; a description of the activities of a
firm of jobbing Victorian printers in the small Scottish village of Fintray
and further topics. Tickets £12, £10 EFDSS and TSF members.
12 Apr
TSF: TRADITIONAL SONG FORUM MEETING
Guests of the Devonshire Association's Music Section.
11-13 Apr FLS: A JOINT CONFERENCE WITH THE HARDY SOCIETY
FOLKLORE, THOMAS HARDY, AND RURAL WRITING
A joint conference of The Thomas Hardy Society and The Folklore
Society, together with the FLS AGM 2014. At The Corn Exchange,
Dorchester, Dorset.
Call For Papers: submissions are invited for 20-minute presentations
on such themes as: folklore in the works of Thomas Hardy; Wessex/
Dorset folklore; folk customs inspired by Hardy; rural writers & writing
about rural traditions in the late 19th-early 20th centuries; etc. Offers
of papers for a panel of post-graduate student papers on Hardy will
be especially welcomed. Send abstracts of 200 words to 8 enquiries@
folklore-society.com, and 8 [email protected], by 15
January 2014.
Ü More information at: : www.folklore-society.com
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The Roots of
Welsh Border Morris
by the late Dave Jones,
1988, revised 1995;
ISBN No. 0 9526285 0 3.
£5 by post from:
Mrs. A. J. Jones, Millfield,
Golden Valley, Bishops Frome,
Worcs WR6 5BN
01885 490323;
email
anniejones@millfield.
orangehome.co.uk