Research

I have always believed strongly in singing the songs from one's community. Now that I live in Cambridgeshire I have been trying to find as many local songs as possible.

This has proved an interesting project because at first I only knew of one song, published in the old Penguin Book of English Folk Songs -Lucy Wan -collected by Ella Bull in Cottenham from Charlotte Dann.

Recently the EFDSS commissioned a new version of the Penguin book revised by the late Malcolm Douglas. The information included in the notes was much more extensive. Thanks to his very generous help I was pointed in the right direction to find and examine all the documents associated with this song and discover many more.

The songs were in the Lucy Broadwood papers (LEB/5/62-74) held in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML) at Cecil Sharp House. Several had already been published by Roy Palmer in his books, but there were many others in that collection of papers that were still lying in wait for someone like me to resurrect them.

I have recorded many of these on Fenlandia and one or two on Cold Fen, and of course they are included in my book.

I had a great deal of fun finding out about the source singers, discovering how to do genealogical searches and eventually even meeting the grand-daughter of Charlotte Dann, the original singer of Lucy Wan. I also discovered a great deal about the original collector, Ella Bull and have visited the house in Cottenham where she once lived with her parents and four sisters.

Later I discovered that Ralph Vaughan Williams had also visited Cambridgeshire in the years 1907-9 and there were manuscript copies of his waiting to be examined in the British Library. There is a microfilm of his manuscript folksong collection at the VWML in Cecil Sharp House, but the originals are much more exciting to see and touch. Vaughan Williams' handwriting was rather idiosyncratic and is very difficult to read at times. Part of the fun was deciphering what he had written, or at least making a best guess. I have been able to reconstruct several of the songs that he noted down ( without texts ) using the wonderful website of the Bodleian Library, which has an extensive section of facsimile Broadside Ballads that is available to the general public. Again, many of the songs collected in Cambridgeshire are recorded on Cold Fen.

I have given several talks, aided by Anahata and illustrated with a slideshow presentation on Songs from Cambridgeshire at Whitby Folk Festival in 2008, EATMT's Vaughan Williams in the East day at Walberswick in 2009, and Cambridge Folk Club more recently.

Cecil Sharp collected in the area, particularly Ely and the Union ( workhouse) and Littleport Town Girls' School , all in 1911. I am currently working on reconstructing the children's games he collected and the songs from the inmates of the workhouse.