English Folk Songs

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.