Vernacular Song and the Folkloric Imagination at the Fin de Siècle

ROSS COLE

In 1893 the polymath, folklorist, and eminent emigrate with his family to New York City, Jewish historian Joseph Jacobs read a paper—as where he became Professor of English and a stopgap—to London’s Folk-lore Society, Rhetoric at the Jewish Theological Seminary of which he had joined in 1889. Raised in Sydney, America. Jacobs journeyed to Britain in 1873; after grad- Simply titled “The Folk,” the paper he uating from the University of Cambridge, he delivered to the Folk-lore Society began as fol- studied briefly in Berlin and subsequently lows: under Francis Galton.1 A prolific scholar with a During the discussions which took place some years seemingly boundless range of interests, Jacobs ago in the Folk-lore Society as to the nature of published literary essays, fought publicly folk-lore, there was one curious omission. Much against anti-Semitism, raised funds for the was said about what the Folk believed, what the plight of persecuted Jews in Russia, and pur- Folk did, and how these sayings and doings of the sued demographic research to counter what he Folk should be arranged and classified. But very saw as the biological essentialism underpin- little indeed was said as to what the Folk was that ning the question of race. Jacobs would later said and did these things, and nothing at all was said as to how they said and did them, and especially as to how they began to say and do them. In short, in I would like to thank Philip Bohlman, Nicholas Cook, dealing with Folk-lore, much was said of the Lore, Marina Frolova-Walker, Vic Gammon, Oskar Cox Jensen, almost nothing was said of the Folk.2 and Ceri Owen. This project was funded by a grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

1Anne J. Kershen, “Jacobs, Joseph (1854–1916),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2004) (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/ 2Joseph Jacobs, “The Folk,” Folklore 4/2 (1893): 233–38, 51106, accessed 1 June 2016). 233.

19th Century Music, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 73–95. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN: 1533-8606 © 2018 by the Regents of the 73 University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals.php?p=reprints. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2018.42.2.73. 19TH Reminding his audience that this “myste- Jacobs’s views have a strikingly modern CENTURY MUSIC rious entity” presumed to be the folk was character, yet they have not fared well in the “many-minded,” Jacobs states and restates a century and a quarter that followed his paper. radical claim: “When we come to realise what Throughout the intense disputes surrounding we mean by saying a custom, a tale, a myth folk song over the years, such views—despite arose from the Folk, I fear we must come to the or perhaps due to their critical aptitude—have conclusion that the said Folk is a fraud, a delu- been silenced, drowned out, or simply forgot- sion, a myth.”3 ten. This article builds on Jacobs’s ideas by Jacobs’s polemic is striking not only for this foregrounding discrepancies between vernacu- audacious statement implicating the very con- lar singing and the work of those affiliated cept of folklore as mythology, but also for his with London’s Folk-Song Society, founded in broader political commitment to understand- 1898. It offers a revisionist account critical not ing the complex patterns of human agency just of expropriative “mediation” but also of lying tacitly beneath folklorists’ theories and the conceptual framework motivating the very collections. Stressing acts of individual idea of folk song.8 artistry, initiative, and borrowing as points of The term Volkslied entered German histo- origin rather than spontaneous acts of commu- riography during the 1770s courtesy of Johann nal creation, Jacobs proposed that “the Folk is Gottfried Herder, and cognate terms such as simply a name for our ignorance: we do not “national music” circulated during the know to whom a proverb, a tale, a custom, a Enlightenment. In Britain, however, influen- myth owes its origin, so we say it originated tial ideas regarding folk song were institution- among the Folk”—wryly portrayed as “a pub- alized by figures with agendas and anxieties lishing syndicate that exploits the productions peculiar to the fin de siècle.9 This era wit- of that voluminous author, Anon.”4 Further- nessed a series of jarring confrontations in more, careful attention should be paid to the which urban modernism clashed with Arca- fact that communities are never entirely her- dian nostalgia, patriotic insularity with cos- metic but rather in constant “culture-contact, mopolitan internationalism, advances in tech- mediate or immediate” with other locales, tra- nology and communications with reactionary ditions, and ideas.5 One key consequence was impulses, and the apogee of Empire with that folklore could not be separated from the bourgeoning socialism.10 By retracing the con- category of art: “We shall have to break down tours of the resulting discourse in relation the rather hard and fast line we draw between folk-lore and literature . . . for, after all, we 8 are the Folk as well as the rustic.”6 Even more A theory of mediation was advanced by Dave Harker in Fakesong: The Manufacture of British “Folksong”: 1700 to remarkably, yet another binary was to be lev- the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, eled: “Breaking down the distinction between 1985). 9 the Folk of the past and of the present, we shall See Philip V. Bohlman, “Herder’s Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 7/1 (2010): 3–21; A be able to study the lore of the present with Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, ed. happy results. . . . The music-hall, from this Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke (Rochester: Camden House, point of view, will have its charm for the folk- 2009); and Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Oss- lorist, who will there find the Volkslieder of ian to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, to-day.”7 2007). 10G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). Interdisciplinary litera- ture on the fin de siècle is expansive, with recent “third 3Ibid., 234. wave” studies adopting a global perspective. See Fin de 4Ibid., 235–36. siècle and Its Legacy, ed. Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter 5Ibid., 236. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Cultural 6Ibid., 237. On this point, see Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Sally Ledger and Scott Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Press, 2000). 1995); The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. 7Jacobs, “The Folk,” 237. Such views of the music hall Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, were extremely rare: see Ross Cole, “Notes on Troubling 2007); and The Fin-de-Siècle World, ed. Michel Saler ‘the Popular’,” Popular Music 37/3 (2018): 392–414. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015).

74 to vernacular song, I want to draw attention one country’s “innate” musical character ROSS COLE to what I term the “folkloric imagination”—a against another. As the contrapuntal perspec- Vernacular conceptual outlook shared by those concerned tive adopted by writers such as Edward Said, Song with the selective preservation of “folk” mate- Homi Bhabha, and Paul Gilroy has demon- rial in the form of written texts over and above strated, however, such Manichean thinking is the intricacies of lived experience. The folk- untenable in view of the hybridities arising loric imagination allowed its practitioners to from globalization and from the profoundly envisage a mythical and curative past driven porous or interstitial nature of colonial by the yearning for an alternative present.11 encounter.13 Likewise, it is impossible to The majority of song collectors, in other square claims made for the unalloyed purity words, were more interested in the beguilingly of folk song with a critical genealogy of this “primitive” quality of the material they sought material. than in the social experience of popular music- Scholars including Robin Kelley, Regina making during the nineteenth century. Bendix, and Matthew Gelbart have established By drawing out the hitherto neglected ties that, although folkloric ideals were rhetori- between folkloric thought and imperialism, cally envisioned as the antithesis of techno- moreover, I seek to advocate a postcolonial logical progress, “premodern” folk culture was turn of thought grounded in the work of constitutively tied up in the fears and desires Michel de Certeau. Folk-song theory shares in of a society in the throes of modernization.14 what Leela Gandhi describes as a “peculiar The concept of folk culture, Kelley argues, is habit of mind” prevalent in the imperial an example of what Lévi-Strauss termed brico- metropolis at the fin de siècle: “A complex lage: “A cutting, pasting, and incorporating of analogical system relentlessly mapping hier- various cultural forms that”—in this archies of race, culture, and civilization upon case—“then become categorized in a racially relationships between genders, species, [and] or ethnically coded aesthetic hierarchy.”15 So classes.”12 Reflecting the broader epistemology understood, folk culture is best viewed as a of colonialism—a worldview striving to trope, a disciplinary force striving to refine, uphold a partitioned model of “us” (civilized, homogenize, and control the intricacies of ver- modern) and “them” (primitive, premod- nacular culture. Frequently called on during ern)—the concept of folk song relied upon periods of upheaval, this Golden Age chimera ideals of cultural particularity untainted by resurfaces like the transpositions of a ritor- intrusions of Otherness. Rather than dwelling nello throughout modern history—ultimately on a fear of contamination by non-Western revealing itself to be, in Raymond Williams’s alterity, however, folk-song discourse con- words, “a myth functioning as a memory.”16 cerned itself with aesthetic polarizations of (organic, unsullied) rural music against (con- 13 trived, degenerate) urban mass culture, and of Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vin- tage, 1994); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: 11Building on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communi- Verso, 1993). ties: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 14Robin D. G. Kelley, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The rev. edn. (London: Verso, 2006) and extending ideas Folk’,” American Historical Review 97/5 (1992): 1400–08; sketched out by Georgina Boyes in The Imagined Village: Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manches- of Folklore Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin ter: Manchester University Press, 1993), I intend this term Press, 1997); and Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music.” to resonate with what Radano and Bohlman have termed See also The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm the “racial imagination”; see Music and the Racial Imag- and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University ination, ed. Ronald M. Radano, Philip V. Bohlman, and Press, 1983). Houston A. Baker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 15Kelley, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk’,” 1402. See 2000). Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. Sybil Wol- 12Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial fram (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of 16Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), Chatto and Windus, 1973), 43. On this theme, see also 7. See also Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Perfor- Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). mance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), and

75 19TH What was unique at the turn of the twenti- What de Certeau terms the “historical opera- CENTURY MUSIC eth century was the foundation of a landmark tion” is a scholarly procedure that alters and institution set up on the basis of this trope redistributes the past through a combination of with the express purpose of collecting, classi- its contingent location, its learned or scientific fying, publicizing, and speculating about folk practices, and the architectural feat of writ- music—namely, the Folk-Song Society. Those ing (including activities of selection and narra- affiliated with this organization were condi- tivization). History thus functions as a kind of tioned by ideas and occurrences specific to performative substitute for the past expressed their time: socialist radicalism, evolutionary on the terms of the present. philosophy, racial degeneration, the rise of sub- For de Certeau, history and anthropology are urbia, and worries over rapidly proliferating united not only by these scriptural practices, mass culture. Their collecting efforts were dri- but also via an equivalent “staging of the other ven by a sense of alarm that society had in present time.”20 Whereas history confronts reached a terminal state from which it would and resurrects the dead (as phantasmic Other), not recover. Writing in 1892, for instance, early ethnography orchestrated and aestheti- Sabine Baring-Gould believed that ballads cized the primitive (as exotic Other). Both would soon “be as extinct as the Mammoth approaches force absent bodies to speak and the Dodo, only to be found in the libraries through the mediation of documents and both of collectors.”17 This notion of an irreplaceable are “heterologies,” that is, hermeneutics of dif- thing perpetually at risk of expiring is the emo- ference based on presumed knowledge of the tional linchpin of the folkloric imagination. Other. The stable order produced by Western authors as a result of such historical and ethno- The Voice under Erasure graphic operations is an illusion. Manifesting “a political will to manage conflicts and to The work of de Certeau offers a productive regulate them from a single point of view,” way of negotiating the convoluted relationship its globalizing and universalizing structure between historiography, ethnography, and resounds with the colonial enterprise.21 alterity vital to understanding the folkloric Viewed in this light, the study of folk song is imagination. The driving force behind his unmistakably a heterology—an attempt to estab- work is a desire to map topographies of power lish through writing a knowledge of what in relation to those trapped within their vision, Richard Middleton has termed the “low aiming to comprehend the ways in which Oth- Other.”22 Relying upon a confluence of colonial- ers have been animated or made to speak from ist historiography and amateur ethnography, col- without.18 For de Certeau, the discourses that lectors did not simply recover songs from the express and circumscribe alterity belong inex- folk, but rather rearticulated them to serve new tricably to historians and ethnographers and and unfamiliar purposes. The evanescent voice not to the objects of their gaze or praxis. All of a folk Other within such material was simul- research aimed at the Other must therefore taneously present and absent, leaving texts to cir- be understood as “the product of a place.”19 cle endlessly around an excess they could never fully capture. Despite turning the Tupi people of Brazil, for example, “into a festive body and an Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 17Sabine Baring-Gould, Strange Survivals: Some Chapters See also Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narra- in the History of Man (London: Methuen & Co., 1892), tive Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: 219. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 18See Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol.1: The 20De Certeau, The Writing of History, 85. Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. 21Ibid., 92. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and 22Richard Middleton, “Musical Belongings: Western Music The Possession at Loudun, trans. Michael B. Smith and Its Low-Other,” in Western Music and Its Others: Dif- (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). ference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. 19Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: Univer- Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 64. sity of California Press, 2000), 59–85.

76 object of pleasure,” de Certeau argues, the travel Folk song at the fin de siècle should conse- ROSS COLE writing of Jean de Léry could not do justice to quently be viewed as the result of three inter- Vernacular the seductive qualities of native speech; what related factors: first, a particular location within Song remained were the mere traces of “irrecoupable, society and time that afforded immersion in con- unexploitable moments.”23 Likewise, when late current aesthetic, political, and historiographical Victorian collectors turned their attention to ver- ideas; second, an ethnographic praxis that rested nacular singing, largely via notebooks, periodi- on the selection and reification of songs as writ- cals, and published scores, they tended to ignore ten texts, imposing reclassifications of vernacu- or unintentionally erase these irrecoupable lar material with unconcealed disdain for mass moments of sonic rapture. What “cannot be culture; and finally, a heterological discourse uprooted” from such environments, de Certeau that strove to interpret the folk via unsubstan- affirms, “remains by definition outside the field tiated theories of origin, survival, and transmis- of research.”24 The drawback of such method- sion. Effecting an erasure of the singing voice, ologies is thus the very condition of their suc- such work ultimately neglected the complexities cess. In order to gather, analyze, and classify folk of cultural practice in favor of what de Certeau material this material first has to be reified and dubs “folklorization”—a process in which a less extracted from its surrounding cultural ecology, powerful milieu is purified by an external effacing the intricate patterns of quotidian mean- authority and reduced to a series of fragments in ing and usage along with the initial act of enun- a museum or mausoleum rendered “like a dio- ciation itself. rama in trompe l’oeil perspective.”29 The cus- All heterologies are unified, de Certeau pro- toms of those unwittingly baptized as “the folk” poses, by this common characteristic of only ever existed in the minds and imaginations “attempting to write the voice,” which conse- of those with the power to foreclose them. Such quently appears in translation and always in the traditions are entirely dependent on this asym- form of a quotation—both in view and yet metrical rapport. Folk traditions, in other words, incomplete.25 Thus we might think of the do not exist outside the discursive edifice of notated score to a collected song representing, in revivalism. Read in this way, folk song is a deeply Derridean terms, the voice sous rature or “under unsound reflection of historical experience—a erasure,” resulting in the following formula: folk profoundly political set of relations masquerad- song = the voice of the Other.26 In this tran- ing as an apolitical universal. scribed form, traces of the Other demand or pre- suppose scholarly exegesis, implicitly position- Horsham’s Grand Old Songster ing an enlightened expert (the collector or theo- rist) as the interpretive spokesperson for a seem- Death, paradoxically, is central to a folkloric ingly unconscious, childlike, or ignorant subject worldview. Something can be revived, after all, (the singer).27 Lodged in written language, these only if it is no longer living. The irony for traces of vocality become proxies for an inacces- folk-song enthusiasts at the turn of the century sible somatic presence. The question is just how was that the objects of their gaze were still much of a trace survives the erasure.28 alive at the moment of revival itself—uncanny specters of the past. The following words were

23De Certeau, The Writing of History, 227–28. 24Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, singers. The Society was nevertheless divided on the subject 1984), 20. at the dawn of the new century. Although championed by 25Ibid., 159, 156. See also Richard Middleton, Voicing the Pop- Percy Grainger among others, many members were ular: On the Subjects of Popular Music (London: Routledge, adamantly against the intrusion of such modern technology 2006). into their field. See the “Discussion” in Broadwood, “On the 26See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Preface to Jacques Derrida, Collecting of English Folk-Song,” 107–08; Anon., “Folk Song Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Balti- and National Song,” Musical Herald 706 (1907): 20–21; and more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xiii–xx. Percy Grainger, “Collecting with the Phonograph,” Journal of 27De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 160. the Folk-Song Society 3/12 (1908): 147–62. 28The advent of the phonograph, of course, fundamentally 29Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural, trans. Tom Conley altered the question of how to preserve the voice of individual (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 138–39.

77 19TH dictated by Henry Burstow, “celebrated bell- through a charitable pension provided by local CENTURY 34 MUSIC ringer and songsinger” of West Sussex, and donations. A mildly eccentric character dedi- published in 1911 in the book Reminiscences cated to model making, painting, and local his- of Horsham. He was then in his mid-eighties: tory, Burstow was also known for his vocifer- ous anti-clericalism and commitment to Dar- I remember, when quite a boy, buying for my mother of a pedlar, as he sang in the street, the old win’s ideas on evolution. The twin pastimes of ballad “Just Before the Battle, Mother.” This was bell ringing and singing, however, had proved her favourite song because, I think, her mother’s to be his greatest pleasures—the latter, as he favourite boy, after having fought in many battles, described it, “My chief mental delight, a had deserted and fled and was never more heard delight that has been my companion day after of. I have sung this song to her many times, never day in my journey from infancy through every without bringing tears to her eyes; her last request stage of life to my now extreme old age.”35 to me as she lay on her death bed (she died 14th Burstow’s passing at ninety was announced March, 1857) was to sing it to her again. It was with sadness in the Musical Herald and this occasion—the occasion that comes but once accompanied by a touching anecdote: “A few in a lifetime—in which my prospective loss was years ago he promised to sing to his wife all measured by the depth of a mother’s requited love, the songs he knew, and it took him six weeks, that I proved most fully the resources of my natural 36 hobby as an outlet for expressions of the tenderest singing ten songs a day . . . all from memory.” sentiments. I feel as sure as that I am myself awaited Burstow himself portrays the scene as follows: by death, that as she lay there, her hand in mine, “As we sat, evening after evening, one on with this her favourite song in her ear, nothing I either side of the fire, as happy as a king and could say or do, nor that anyone else could say or queen, I singing my best, she listening and do could have better pleased or satisfied her last occasionally herself singing one of the fifty 30 moments. songs I had taught her, the old songs seemed as Burstow had become somewhat of a local fresh and as pretty as they did when I first sang them fifty, sixty, perhaps seventy years or more celebrity. A South Coast correspondent for the 37 Musical Herald noted that Horsham’s “grand ago.” old songster” had presented material at a pub- Often being able to memorize a lyric on first lic band concert at the age of eighty-two.31 His or second hearing, Burstow had acquired his customary surroundings, however, tended to repertoire of 420 songs from a number of peo- be local pubs, “Where song singing was always ple in a variety of ways. He records these regularly indulged in during the evenings” sources in detail: his father, mother, and throughout the year.32 There was “not a village brother-in-law; local laborers and craftsmen; a Inn for miles around,” he declared, “where I sailor, a tailor, and an ex-soldier; the parish have not sung” and invariably been asked to clerk; encounters in “taprooms and parlours return.33 of public houses in the Towns and Villages The son of clay tobacco-pipe makers, round . . . where the words of many songs have Burstow had grown up in poverty; having been taught and learnt, exchanged or sold, for earned his living as an artisan shoemaker, in perhaps a pint of beer”; and “ballad sheets I old age he narrowly escaped the workhouse bought as they were being hawked about at the fairs, and at other times from other printed

30Henry Burstow, Reminiscences of Horsham: Being Recollections of Henry Burstow, the Celebrated Bellringer 34A. E. Green and Tony Wales, foreword, Burstow, Rem- and Songsinger, ed. William Albery (1911; rpt. Norwood, iniscences of Horsham. The only detailed treatment of PA: Norwood Editions, 1975), 108–09. Albery was a local Burstow’s repertoire to date is Vic Gammon, “‘Not Appre- saddle-maker, socialist, and amateur historian who ciated in Worthing?’ Class Expression and Popular Song recorded Burstow’s recollections; all proceeds from the Texts in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Popular Music book went to Burstow himself. 4 (1984): 5–24. 31“News from All Parts,” Musical Herald 721 (April 1907): 35Burstow, Reminiscences of Horsham, 107. 107–11, 109. 36“News from All Parts,” Musical Herald 816 (March 32Burstow, Reminiscences of Horsham, 108. 1916): 112–15, 113. 33Ibid., 109. 37Burstow, Reminiscences of Horsham, 109.

78 matter.”38 New songs, he noted, had also been “pervasive feature of the English soundscape” ROSS COLE composed to mark specific occasions or from the Tudor period up to the late nine- Vernacular stemmed from the creative flair of his friend teenth century, broadsides were pasted up in Song Jim Manvell, a Horsham bricklayer.39 houses, displayed on alehouse walls, and dis- In Burstow’s catalogue we thus find an persed around public spaces.43 Powerfully eclectic assortment of music encompassing shaping rural traditions within what Christo- broadsides, minstrel songs, Victorian senti- pher Marsh describes as a “never-ending mental airs, and other material by British and process of circulation,” these ubiquitous American writers including Henry Russell, sheets were initially accompanied by an indi- Charles Dibdin, Henry Clay Work, Frederic cation of melody (by title only) and illustrative Weatherly, M. G. Lewis (author of the Gothic (often stock) woodcuts; later ballads, by con- novel The Monk), and Stephen Foster.40 trast, tended to lack indications of melody.44 Burstow’s repertoire, moreover, bore an uncan- Encompassing a wide variety of topics, broad- nily close resemblance to contemporary broad- sides habitually contained songs of courtship, sheets. The vast majority of his songs appeared marriage, thwarted or feigned love, sex, satire, in catalogues for the printers H. P. Such, religion, and political commentary. Although William Fortey, and Pearson of Manchester. identified with the vulgar population and This variety, as Vic Gammon points out, was much maligned by authorities, such material not unusual for either market town residents was also amassed by the elite. During the eigh- or rural singers of the period—attesting to the teenth century, for example, the antiquarian “fundamental heterogeneity” of nineteenth- Bishop Thomas Percy recovered and amended century working-class culture.41 a selection of popular ballads in a bid to estab- Burstow’s account bears witness to a long lish a noble heritage of minstrelsy in response tradition of vernacular singing largely over- to both scurrilous topical singing and the ficti- looked by musicologists. Mass produced in tious Scottish bard Ossian, thus helping to lay urban centers and disseminated extensively by the foundations of British Romanticism and networks of itinerant hawkers, printed broad- crystallizing an aesthetic hierarchy echoed in side ballads were central to the history of popu- the monumental work of Child.45 lar culture.42 Comprising, as Adam Fox notes, a Rather than descending from ancient bards via an oral tradition, however, these songs had arisen from a promiscuous series of migrations within 38 Ibid., 107–08. the commercial print marketplace.46 The 39Ibid., 25, 55, 64, and 108. 40Literature on these figures is unfortunately sparse, with authorship of ballads was consequently elu- the notable exception of Charles Dibdin and Late Geor- sive, with texts existing in multiple variants or gian Culture, ed. Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley, and resulting from collations and borrowings from Ian Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), and Ken Emerson, Doo-dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of other literary and musical sources. The idea American Popular Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, of folk song subdued this fluid intertextual 1997). complexity in favor of a paradigm of organic, 41Gammon, “‘Not Appreciated in Worthing?’” 23. See also Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth- Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, Ballad Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara 2008), and Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu. Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print 43Adam Fox, “The Emergence of the Scottish Broadside and Oral Traditions, ed. David Atkinson and Steve Roud Ballad in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Cen- (London: Routledge, 2016). turies,” Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 31/2 (2011): 42See Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Mod- 169–94, 170. ern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); 44Marsh, Music and Society, 223. David Atkinson, The English Traditional Ballad: Theory, 45See Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques Method, and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); and Oskar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and Mary Ellen Cox Jensen, “The Travels of John Magee: Tracing the Geogra- Brown, Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece: The English and phies of Britain’s Itinerant Print-Sellers, 1789–1815,” Cultural Scottish Popular Ballads (Urbana: University of Illinois and Social History 11/2 (2014): 195–216. For reproductions, Press, 2011). see the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library collection 46David Atkinson, “Folk Songs in Print: Text and Tradi- at http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk and the English Broadside tion,” Folk Music Journal 8/4 (2004): 456–83.

79 19TH unsullied orality. Ironically, the republication Funded by a private income, she never married. CENTURY MUSIC of songs by collectors at the fin de siècle con- From 1894 she resided in London, performing cealed the very materiality of the environ- as an amateur singer, and extending her musi- ments from which these songs had been col- cal and ethnological interests through active lected. involvement in both the Purcell Society and Although he neither described himself as a the Folk-Lore Society.50 As Burstow mentions, folk singer nor identified his repertoire as folk Broadwood published a number of songs in song, Burstow was cast as an epitome of “the 1893 in collaboration with the music critic J. folk” as the result of an encounter with one of A. Fuller Maitland. In their preface to the vol- the foremost collectors of the late nineteenth ume, entitled English County Songs, Broad- century. As he tells it: wood and Fuller Maitland remarked that their correspondents had been forced to spend “con- In 1892–3 I lent my list of songs to Miss Lucy E. Broadwood (later Hon. Secretary and Editor to the Folk siderable time” persuading regional singers to Song Society), and sang to her a large number of them, perform: “The difficulty of getting the old- which she noted . . . I am glad to know that in these fashioned songs out of the people is steadily 51 ways have been preserved the words and tunes of on the increase.” Once certain elderly singers nearly all those songs of mine that come within the began, the editors observed, they nonetheless objects of the Society, viz.: those that are “traditional had “a good deal of difficulty in leaving off” survivals of songs expressive of the thoughts and as “they are not unnaturally pleased to see emotions of untaught people passing between mind their old songs appreciated by anybody in these and mind from more or less remote periods to the degenerate days”—a comment to which I shall present time.” Some of them have been published, return.52 with the tunes harmonized, by Miss Broadwood, and That same year, Broadwood wrote to the can now be bought in cheap book form.47 Magazine of Music with an appeal described The quotation—noted in what appears to be as being of interest to “students of the science an editorial codicil as a definition meeting called folklore.”53 By reason “of a gross and “with the approval of the Hon. Secretary of culpable carelessness,” it announced, “England the Folk Song Society”—strikes as an intrusion has lost most of her folksongs.”54 Although fig- into Burstow’s narrative, moderating the com- ures such as Sabine Baring-Gould and Frank plexities of vernacular experience.48 Only Kidson had “rescued” numerous traditional those songs falling “within the objects of the tunes, it continued, “We want these wild- Society” warranted attention as exemplars of flowers of minstrelsy to be systematically and material having survived the passage of time accurately arranged and classified, and, if pos- by moving organically among the rural popu- sible, their inner meaning extracted.”55 The lation through an unspecified osmotic process. appeal ended with a plea to anyone “who can In this definition (itself mythologized and get hold of an old folksong” to send it to Miss anonymous like the material it claimed to Broadwood, “never mind how stupid its words delineate), songs seemed to have more agency may seem.”56 Aspiring collectors were than singers themselves. implored to approach people in order to “get Great-granddaughter of the English piano and harpsichord manufacturer John Broad- 50 wood, Lucy Broadwood had spent the majority Broadwood’s participation in meetings of the Folk-Lore Society is mentioned in “Publications and Proceedings of of her life until age thirty-six at the family’s Archaeological Societies,” The Antiquary 27 (April 1893): country manor house, “Lyne,” not far from 169–76. 51 Horsham on the Surrey–Sussex border.49 English Country Songs: Words and Music, ed. Lucy E. Broadwood and J. A. Fuller Maitland (London: Leadenhall Press, 1893), iv. 52Ibid. 47Burstow, Reminiscences of Horsham, 110. 53“Au Courant,” Magazine of Music 10/3 (March 1893): 48Ibid. 49–51, 50. 49For biographical information, see Dorothy de Val, In 54Ibid. Search of Song: The Life and Times of Lucy Broadwood 55Ibid. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 56Ibid.

80 [songs] out of them” by noting down the words by reshaping material in this way, but they also ROSS COLE and scoring the tunes, with the aid of a parish relied upon their own aesthetic inclinations to Vernacular organist if musical aptitude was lacking.57 gather and select the small number of songs Song To be sure, Broadwood acknowledged that published from the total collected.63 the spread of ballads “was of course due to the Broadwood was thus less interested in recu- pedlars” and that “the existence of various ver- perating the culture of vernacular singing sions of the same tune is a great difficulty in around Burstow than in transcribing, preserv- the way of those who would verify their orig- ing, and disseminating a particular facet of his inal form.”58 Nevertheless, the preface to Eng- repertoire that she considered to be more valu- lish County Songs appears torn between a folk- able and authentic than the rest. While mate- loric vision of “tunes that remain among the rial deemed “traditional” and aesthetically English peasantry” and the conflicting admis- pleasing was safeguarded as folklore the rest sion that “districts in which music is largely was rendered obsolete and hence invisible. As cultivated among the poorer classes are not Maud Karpeles later acknowledged, “The tra- those in which the old tunes are most carefully ditional singer . . . does not distinguish preserved and handed down.”59 And indeed between folk songs and other songs in his Broadwood had collected songs not only from repertory.”64 Published songbooks could never working-class singers such as Burstow but also capture the social practices they attested to from her own father and the London musical and necessarily erased a singer’s personal antiquary A. J. Hipkins, a family friend.60 tastes, along with experiences such as sere- The principal way in which vernacular song nading a mother on her deathbed, listening to was essentialized and transfigured by this a spouse by the fireside, buying and learning songbook, however, was in the harmonization a printed ballad, or exchanging material in a and arrangement of material for trained voice local pub. Popular songs had always been and piano accompaniment, uprooting melodies imbued with such intimate acts and memo- from their original environment and transport- ries. As de Certeau writes in relation to ing them, in a new guise, to the middle-class proverbs and everyday material culture, drawing room as neatly notated objects. As objects and discourses are marked and manip- Broadwood and Fuller Maitland confess, ulated by users, and thereby indicate “a social “While to give the tunes without accompani- historicity.”65 Through processes of selection, ment is doubtless the most scientific method reclassification, notation, and harmonization, of preserving the songs, it has the disadvantage the concept of folk song eradicated this social of rendering them practically useless to edu- historicity in the same gesture that aimed to cated singers.”61 The idiom chosen consciously extricate the material’s “inner meaning.” realigned these melodies with the European Key to this project was the widespread belief art song tradition. In several cases, the editors at the fin de siècle that contemporaneous culture noted, where tunes showed “remarkable affin- contained and occasionally reproduced remnants ity with a song of Schubert’s, the accompa- of the distant past. The anthropologist E. B. niment has been treated in more or less his Tylor, for example, had stressed in 1869 that style.”62 Not only did Broadwood and Fuller civilized society retained “vestiges of the course Maitland act as gatekeepers to the vernacular of its development” or “modern representatives of pre-historic man” offering clues to the significance of existing cultural mores.66 57Ibid. 58English County Songs, iv, iii. 59Ibid., iii, iv. See also Arthur Knevett and Vic Gammon, 63See Pamela J. Shoemaker and Tim P. Vos, Gatekeeping “English Folk Song Collectors and the Idea of the Peasant,” Theory (New York: Routledge, 2009). Folk Music Journal 11/1 (2016): 42–64. 64Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp: His Life and Work (London: 60E. David Gregory, “Before the Folk-Song Society: Lucy Faber & Faber, 2008), 39. Broadwood and English Folk Song, 1884–97,” Folk Music 65De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 21. Journal 9/3 (2008): 372–414. 66E. B. Tylor, “On the Survival of Savage Thought in Modern 61English County Songs, v. Civilization,” Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and 62Ibid. Art 18–19 (1869): 566 and 598, 598.

81 19TH Broadwood was conversant with such ideas, hav- mation of a Folk-Song Society, having for its CENTURY MUSIC ing participated in discussions at the Folk-Lore object the preservation of the traditional songs Society—one, in particular, during which the of the United Kingdom.”70 Letters of commen- antiquarian T. F. Ordish presented a paper argu- dation were read from the antiquarian Frank ing that Mumming plays “place us in contact Kidson as well as such musical luminaries as with the pagan beliefs and rites of our northern Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, Sir Alexander and Teutonic forefathers.”67 Broadwood’s col- Campbell Mackenzie, and Sir George Grove. league Baring-Gould, moreover, had published a The scientific work this new group desired to book on the subject in 1892 offering interpreta- undertake—a report in the Musical News tions of curious customs from architecture and declared—was the “collecting and preserving riddles to dolls, etiquette, and the gallows. Rely- [of] specimens of folk-song.”71 ing on the idea that “survivals” provided a link The Society was officially constituted in “to a period when all men were children” and June. By early 1899 it boasted a membership of likewise to “savage races” with “low mental over one hundred, funds of over forty pounds, condition” (the example given is sub-Saharan and four Vice Presidents including the Africans), the patient research “of the compara- Principal of the Royal Academy of Music, the tive mythologist and ethnologist,” Baring-Gould Director of the Royal College of Music, and insisted, enabled European customs to be deci- Professors of music from the Universities of phered.68 Oxford and Cambridge.72 The ambitions of this Equating “primitive” culture with infancy organization were twofold: first, to discover, and strata of the deep past, the folkloric imag- collect, and publish material; and second, to be ination was saturated with the hierarchies of a forum for performances, lectures, and discus- colonialist epistemology. Whether guardians or sions. Applauding these aims in the Musical inventors of song, the folk were trapped in a Standard, the critic Edward Baughan suggested childlike state of purity, representative of that if proceedings of the Society were to be humanity before it had attained the full pow- published, “It might be well to give the orig- ers—and experienced the most unfavorable inal notation of the member who took down consequences—of enlightened rationality. By any folk song side by side with a suggested projecting this structure onto the milieu they adaptation or restoration, or whatever you like aimed to document, in lieu of embracing its to call a folk song in its cooked-up form.”73 values, collectors at the fin de siècle generated In an oddly oblique way, Baughan’s advice was a taxonomy entirely at odds with their field heeded. When the Society began publishing its of inquiry. Alleged to contain premodern sur- Journal, strophic melodies were printed (albeit vivals, vernacular singing, we might say, was in conventional notation) without harmoniza- hijacked by the modern discourse of folk song. tion; when these songs were presented at meet- ings, however, “cooked-up” versions per- Down in the Black Horse formed by members of the Society supplanted these published “specimens.” In late January 1898 a meeting chaired by Recognized in her obituary as “the virtual Alfred Nutt, President of the Folk-Lore Soci- founder of the Folk-Song Society,” Lee had ety, convened in the rooms of the Irish Literary been elected as Honorary Secretary and was Society in central London. Among those known for delivering lectures on her own present were Broadwood, Fuller Maitland, and rather audacious collecting work.74 An the professional contralto Kate Lee.69 As reported in the Manchester Guardian, the pur- 70 pose of this meeting was “to discuss the for- Ibid. 71J. E. B. “Comments on Events,” Musical News 14/362 (1898): 126–29, 129. 72Journal of the Folk-Song Society 1/1 (1899): i–viii. 67“Publications and Proceedings,” 172. 73Edward Baughan, “Comments and Opinions,” Musical 68Baring-Gould, Strange Survivals, 127, 143–44, 61. Standard 9/214 (1898): 80. 69“Our London Correspondence,” Manchester Guardian, 74“The Late Honorary Secretary,” Journal of the Folk- 28 January 1898, 5. Song Society 2/6 (1905): 67.

82 embodiment of fin-de-siècle feminism, Lee sometimes sang alternate verses as a duet, pro- ROSS 79 COLE spoke not only at the Society’s inaugural con- ducing a “distinctly comic” effect. Vernacular versazione, but also at the 1899 International Lee had begun collecting songs in “a little Song Congress of Women, where she “gave an seaport town in the north of Norfolk, not amusing account of the difficulties she expe- patronised by tourists, and with no special rienced in collecting folk-songs, and she attraction of any sort, except fresh air and level besought her audience to help to collect airs roads” (suitable for her bicycle) named Wells- from country people before they sank out of next-the-Sea.80 One morning while wandering recollection.”75 Described by the Musical along the Quay she plucked up the courage Herald as “a lady of winning personality” to confront four elderly fishermen whose faces who could “equally well get to the heart of an had become familiar during her promenades: old longshoreman or of an aristocratic audi- They told me I had better find “Tom C—–,” whose ence at the West End,” Lee did not restrict her aunt, they thought, “sang old songs, but was dead,” ethnography to rural locations. She believed but that, no doubt, Tom himself could sing them if I that traditional songs also survived in towns liked to hear them. Tom was sent for and told to call and cities among “those who have left their on me in the evening, and he came, dressed up in his homes” and were less suspicious of outsiders best, and shaking with fright. He said he thought he than country dwellers.76 could sing, but when he began he was so frightfully One of Lee’s most humorous anecdotes nervous that not a note could he utter, and he gave way involves “a very old lady living in the East of to groans, interspersed with whistling when he got London” whom she characterizes as “a verita- anywhere near the air, and I almost gave up the idea ble storehouse of folk-songs”: as hopeless after hearing him, although I took down one tune which was fairly good, which, as I afterwards I had qualms when she first threatened to come and found from Mr. Frank Kidson, was not traditional. sing to me; I thought she might be a burglar in disguise, However, he told me the names of several songs that so when she arrived I took down songs with one eye had been sung in Wells in times gone by, one especially on the umbrellas and the other on the paper, but she I remember the name of, which was “The Wreck of the did not take anything, although she left, I think, a good Princess Royal.” I did not take down this song, because deal. She said that she hadn’t ever visited a real lady the title had a modern sound, but I afterwards found before, but “that I wasn’t the least bit like one.” This out that I had made a great mistake.81 was, of course, a sort of back-handed compliment, at least I took it to be so.77 Tom, in turn, had directed her to an ex- soldier and veteran of the Opium Wars by Tracing the origin of such tunes, Lee the name of Edge, from whom she collected observed, was nonetheless extremely difficult, a song “decidedly Welsh in character.”82 Lee’s as “the same song would be heard, with slight account foregrounds such hybrid and transna- 78 variations, in different districts.” A further tional qualities in popular music, noting, for trouble Lee encountered when attempting to example, the presence of “Scotch” melodies notate melodies in rural areas was what she in the West of Ireland—a place where she described as “the monotonous, expressionless, found, to her evident surprise, that “few peo- rapid way of the country singers, who stood ple sang Irish songs.”83 Such findings would upright, and looked fixedly in front of them” or create trouble when the folk-song movement began to take on a more determinedly nation- alistic bearing under Cecil Sharp.84 75“Musical Matters at the International Congress of Women,” School Music Review 8/87 (1899): 45–46, 46. See also Gillian Sutherland, In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 79Ibid. 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 80Lee, “Some Experiences,” 8. 2015). 81Ibid., 8–9. 76“Experiences of a Folk-Song Collector,” Musical Herald 82Ibid., 9. 612 (March, 1899): 71. 83Ibid., 10. 77Kate Lee, “Some Experiences of a Folk-Song Collector,” 84On this phase of the revival under Sharp’s influence, see Journal of the Folk-Song Society 1/1 (1899): 7–12, 10. Ross Cole, “On the Politics of Folk Song Theory in Edwar- 78“Experiences of a Folk-Song Collector.” dian England,” Ethnomusicology 63/1 (2019), in press.

83 19TH Published in the first issue of the Journal of Aside from these brief sketches Lee reveals CENTURY MUSIC the Folk-Song Society, Lee’s lecture also includes little about the lives of the individuals from remarks on her successful collection of material whom she collected. Bob Copper’s retrospec- from the now celebrated Copper brothers of Rot- tive account affords a rare view from the per- tingdean, a coastal village near Brighton: spective of the singers themselves: I shall never forget the delight of hearing the two Mrs Kate Lee came to the village to stay at Sir Mr. Coppers . . . they were so proud of their Sussex Edward Carson’s house up at Bazehill. She had heard songs, and sang them with an enthusiasm grand of James and Tom singing their old songs down in to hear, and when I questioned them as to how the Black Horse and, wishing to learn more about many they thought they could sing, they said they them, invited them up to the big house one evening. thought about “half a hundred.” You had only to They put on their Sunday clothes and went along. start either of them on the subject of the song and Any embarrassment they might have felt at being they commenced at once. “Oh, Mr. Copper, can you asked to sing in front of a lady in an elegantly sing me a love song, a sea song, or a plough song?” furnished drawing-room instead of at home in the It did not matter what it was, they looked at each cottage or in the tap room of the “Black ’un” was other significantly, and with perfectly grave faces off soon dispelled by generous helpings from a full they would go. Mr. Thomas Copper’s voice was as bottle of whisky standing in the middle of the table flexible as a bird’s. He always sang the under part of with two cut-glass tumblers and a decanter of water. the song like a sort of obbligato, impossible, at first They sang, they drank and sang again and all the hearing, to put down.85 time Mrs Lee was noting down the words and music of their efforts. They kept this up all evening and Along with his elder brother James “Brasser” were not allowed to leave until the bottle on the Copper, Thomas had worked as a farm laborer table was empty and the book on Mrs Lee’s lap was in rural Sussex most of his life; by the time of full. After several more evenings, proceeding on the Lee’s visit in 1898, however, he had become the same lines as before only with different songs, she landlord of a small public house.86 As his great- returned to London with what was later referred to grandnephew later documented, during his time as a “copper-ful” of songs.90 as a publican Thomas had “formed a team of Although the two men were made Honorary hand-bell ringers, kept the traditional Mummer’s Members of the Folk-Song Society for their Play alive, and was the host to a gathering of all 87 contributions, the cultural disparity between the old village singers every Saturday night.” In Lee and the Copper brothers is unmistakable, transcribing their material, Lee declares, “I sim- compounded by the asymmetry of subject and ply tired out the two Mr. Coppers after three 88 spectator. Much as Broadwood was with evenings’ hard work.” The result was six songs Burstow, Lee was drawn to James and Thomas published in the Society’s Journal. If such tunes primarily as repositories of material that could were “left to take care of themselves in the vil- be carried in written form from the country- lages,” Lee concluded, “how soon will they die side to the metropolis as intriguing tokens of and be heard no more”; she hoped that members folklore. Rather than showing interest in the would thus “find their way down to the piers and brothers’ environment, in other words, Lee quays before the old fishermen have gone out 89 viewed the Coppers much as Thomas Percy with the tide.” had viewed his apocryphal folio, saved from the flames of obsolescence not for their intrin- sic worth but for the content they conveyed. 85Lee, “Some Experiences,” 10–11. 86Bob Copper, A Song for Every Season: A Hundred Years Reading Lee’s and the Coppers’ accounts of a Sussex Farming Family (London: Heinemann, 1971), 11. against each other exposes a telling perceptual There are some minor discrepancies between Lee’s account disjunction, as if the Coppers had provided a and that of Bob Copper; for clarification, see Vic Gammon, “Copper family (per. 1845–2000),” Oxford Dictionary of photographic negative of Lee’s perspective. National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Uprooted from both pub and cottage and held http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/76466, accessed 20 captive in a country house by an unfamiliar June 2016. 87Copper, A Song for Every Season, 11. 88Lee, “Some Experiences,” 11. 89Ibid., 12. 90Copper, A Song for Every Season, 12.

84 woman of higher social status, the Coppers ing to the Musical Standard, this “very success- ROSS 93 COLE were requested to sing in a manner wholly for- ful evening” attracted around 250 guests. After Vernacular eign to their quotidian experience while wear- the “continuous laughter” occasioned by Lee’s Song ing clothes ordinarily reserved for church. “very solid and useful” paper, this article stated, Although the bottle of whisky was plainly an her performance of “The Claudy Banks,” pre- indispensable provision, Lee tactfully omits to sented as a duet with the baritone Charles mention it. The uncomfortable environment, Phillips, was the “most applauded” performance moreover, played a decisive role in James and of the night.94 The audience was thus granted Thomas’s choice concerning which songs to access to the Copper brothers’ songs only via a offer. As Broadwood admitted, self-censorship chain of mediations in which the songs were fil- regarding anticipated vulgarity “makes it hard tered, notated, arranged, and restaged by a group for a woman to collect” because “the singer is of metropolitan folk-song devotees. Performing far too kind to offend her ears, but is almost in the place of an absent “folk,” these figures always unable to hum or whistle an air apart brought to life an essentialized simulacrum of from its words.”91 the vernacular on their own terms. Lee’s account of meeting the Coppers—the In thus staging an imitation of the Other only one made public at the time—inadvertently through stereotype folk-song revivalists were forms a portrait of a collision between unequal participating in what Robert Cantwell has cultural spheres, one of which was denied its termed “ethnomimesis,” festive rituals of own voice save through acts of gatekeeping mimicry that occur at the boundaries of substantiated by the folkloric imagination. In groups, classes, or cultures.95 Folk song in this spite of her good intentions, Lee’s ethnographic context becomes the vehicle of an imaginative praxis erased the vernacular practices she misconstrual set at an intersection of high and encountered. Formulated without consulta- low where musical performance brings a new tion with the singers, her aesthetic judgments social collectivity into existence.96 Crucially, held the power to determine what was “tradi- however, the very people branded as bearers of tional” and what was not. The “folk” them- folk song by the creators of this milieu nei- selves could not be trusted, it seemed, with ther used nor identified with the term. Once the propagation or categorization of their own it is spoken, as de Certeau points out, such a songs. language nevertheless “implies points of refer- Members of the Society, as noted, were inter- ence, sources, a history, an iconography”—in ested not only in publishing folk songs as scien- short, “a construction of ‘authorities.’”97 In tific specimens, but also in composing arrange- England, the Folk-Song Society became one ments intended for refined performances in the such authority, articulating a linguistic very social settings that made Tom C. and the Coppers feel so uncomfortable. Held at 7 Chesterfield Gardens in London’s Mayfair—the (1858–1927),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). http://www. lavish residence of Rachel Beer, born in India to oxforddnb.com/view/article/48270, accessed 20 June 2016. the merchant Sassoon dynasty and later editor 93“The Folk-Song Society,” Musical Standard 11/267 (Febru- (as well as owner with her invalid husband Fred- ary, 1899): 81. 94Ibid. erick) of both the Observer and the Sunday 95Robert Cantwell, Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Rep- Times—the first general meeting of the Society resentation of Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North in February 1899 featured Lee singing a number Carolina Press, 1993). See also Tamara E. Livingston, “Music Revivals: Toward a General Theory,” Ethnomusi- of the Copper brothers’ songs with piano accom- cology 43/1 (1999): 66–85, and The Oxford Handbook of paniment provided by Fuller Maitland.92 Accord- Music Revival, ed. Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 96See Kay Kaufman Shelemay, “Musical Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Music,” Journal of the Amer- 91Lucy E. Broadwood, “On the Collecting of English Folk- ican Musicological Society 64/2 (2011): 349–90, and Ceri Song,” Proceedings of the Musical Association 31 Owen, “Making an English Voice: Performing National (1904–05): 89–109, 101. Identity during the English Musical Renaissance,” 92“A Folk-Song Function,” Musical Times 40/673 (1899): Twentieth-Century Music 13/1 (2016): 77–107. 168–69; Vanessa Curney, “Beer [née Sassoon], Rachel 97De Certeau, Culture in the Plural, 11.

85 19TH iconography based on “the folk” and their fellow-creatures” through the study of folk CENTURY 101 MUSIC “folk song.” The work of its collectors, based music. In “true folk-songs,” he contends, on the production of written documents exiled there is nothing “common or unclean . . . no from their sources in practice, sought, as de sham, no got-up glitter, and no vulgarity.”102 Certeau asserts, “to confer upon them the sta- These “treasures of humanity” were becoming tus of ‘abstract’ objects of knowledge.”98 ever more rare, as they are “written in char- Rather than retrieving source data, such work acters the most evanescent you can imagine, constitutes its data “through concerted actions upon the sensitive brain fibres of those who which delimit it by carving it out from the learn them and have but little idea of their sphere of use,” pushing it “beyond the limits value.”103 The Society existed to rescue this of use” and ultimately creating the possibility precious material from degeneration just as for an entirely new history to be written.99 De folk song itself might resuscitate a culture Certeau thereby directs us toward the idea that allegedly on the brink of ruin. collecting refers not to the discovery, but For Parry, the primary agent of decay in this instead to the manufacture of objects through profligate world of commercialism was urban classification and the arrogation of material popular music—a symptom of the exponential culture in accordance with contingent intellec- growth in retail, leisure, and mass entertain- tual motivations. ment industries around the fin de siècle. Dri- ven by a small but significant rise in real A Wholesome and Seasonable Enterprise working-class wages, this growth encompassed everything from music hall variety theater to But what were these motivations? A clue is sensationalist newspapers, penny novels, soc- provided by the passing allusion to “degenerate cer, and gambling. Parry’s contempt was days” in the preface to English County Songs. unequivocal: The increased attention shown to folk song at There is an enemy at the doors of folk-music which this time testifies not only to genteel curiosity is driving it out, namely, the common popular songs and personal idiosyncrasy but also to a seam of the day; and this enemy is one of the most of deeper and more disquieting anxiety pecu- repulsive and most insidious. If one thinks of the liar to the fin de siècle. At the opening of his outer circumference of our terribly overgrown Inaugural Address as a Vice-President of the towns where the jerry-builder holds sway; where Society, Sir Hubert Parry brought such issues one sees all around the tawdriness of sham jewellery vividly to the fore: and shoddy clothes, pawnshops and flaming gin-palaces; where stale fish and the miserable piles Ladies and Gentlemen.—I think I may premise that of Covent Garden refuse which pass for vegetables this Society is engaged upon a wholesome and are offered for food—all such things suggest to one’s seasonable enterprise. For, in these days of high mind the boundless regions of sham. It is for the pressure and commercialism, when a little people who live in these unhealthy regions—people smattering of knowledge of the science of heredity who, for the most part, have the most false ideals, impels people to think it is hopeless to contend or none at all—who are always struggling for against their bad impulses because they are bound existence, who think that the commonest to inherit the bad qualities of countless shoals of rowdyism is the highest expression of human ancestors, there is a tendency with some of us to emotion; it is for them that the modern popular 100 become cynical. music is made, and it is made with a commercial 104 The “best remedy available,” he claimed, intention out of snippets of musical slang. was to “revive a belief in, and love of our The unrefined conduct and counterfeit com- modities of “the seething towns” risked

98De Certeau, The Writing of History, 73. 99Ibid. 100Hubert Parry, “Inaugural Address,” Journal of the 101Parry, “Inaugural Address,” 1. Folk-Song Society 1/1 (1899): 1–3, 1. For biographical 102Ibid. information, see Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry: His 103Ibid. Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 104Ibid., 1–2.

86 jeopardizing the bucolic folk.105 In this vision, our great city-populations, seem in our pes- ROSS COLE mass culture spread like a virus, infecting the simistic moments to indicate as its inevitable Vernacular enfeebled and unhealthy population with the destiny.”110 Song disease of industrialized modernity. By con- Affording joy through “the simple beauty of trast, Parry expounded, “Folk-music is among primitive thought,” folk song appeared to lay the purest products of the human mind” bare the unshakable bedrock of humanity as a because it “grew in the hearts of the people result of “emotions which are common to all before they devoted themselves so assiduously men alike.”111 Hidden away in folk song, con- to the making of quick returns.”106 As an sequently, was the source of economic parity, extension of the natural world, folk song flour- brotherhood, and social(ist) rejuvenation. ished in this Edenic nursery before capitalism What has tended to pass without notice is brought on the Fall. It was artisanal, organic, how such ideas point toward Parry’s intellec- and self-sufficient. tual affinity with the heterogeneous politics Such music, moreover, was “characteristic of fin-de-siècle radicalism. His daughter of the race, of the quiet reticence of our coun- Dorothea stressed that even though he epito- try folk, courageous and content . . . and, as a mized a life of privilege, Parry was in fact “nat- faithful reflection of ourselves, we needs must urally unconventional . . . a Radical, with a cherish it.”107 Folk song thus became the mir- very strong bias against Conservatism” who ror of an idealized political community. In con- counted both William Morris and Edward sequence, it harbored pertinent material for Burne-Jones among his close friends.112 The composers of the so-called English Musical influence of these two figureheads of the Arts Renaissance. Folk heritage, Parry declares, pro- and Crafts Movement (some fifteen years older vided “the ultimate solution of the problem than Parry himself) was evident not only in a of characteristic national art.”108 True style, he small decorative monochrome print depicting maintains, is not individual, but stems from entwined lilies adorning the published text of “crowds of fellow-workers, who sift, and try, his address (plate 1), but also in his reformist and try again, till they have found the thing elevation of organicism, communal tradition, that suits their native taste.”109 Folk song was and integrity over laissez faire economics and thus the great social—and potentially even the supposed deterioration of public culture.113 socialist—leveler, cutting across class divi- Although opposed to aestheticist individualism, sions to unite the nation as a new utopian Parry’s address shares in Oscar Wilde’s socialist polis. Indeed, Parry elucidates the political conviction that society could be restored to motivation underpinning the Society’s founda- full health by “substituting cooperation for tion: “To comfort ourselves by the hope that competition” and liberating art from the tyran- at bottom, our puzzling friend, Democracy, has nizing “vulgarity and stupidity” of commercial permanent qualities hidden away somewhere, popular taste.114 Parry’s vision of democracy which may yet bring it out of the slough which the scramble after false ideals, the strife 110 between the heads that organise and the work- Ibid. 111Ibid. men who execute, and the sordid vulgarity of 112Dorothea Ponsonby, “Hubert Parry,” Musical Times 97/ 1359 (1956): 263. Parry’s views fell within the tradition of “Romantic socialism” in Britain. See Anna Vaninskaya, “Janus-Faced Fictions: Socialism as Utopia and Dystopia 105Ibid., 2. in William Morris and George Orwell,” Utopian Studies 106Ibid. 14/2 (2003): 83–98, and Caroline Arscott, William Morris 107Ibid. and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (New Haven, CT: 108Ibid., 3. See Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The Yale University Press, 2008). English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940: Constructing a 113See Rosalind P. Blakesley, The Arts and Crafts Move- National Music (Manchester: Manchester University ment (London: Phaidon, 2006). Press, 2001). For an extended critique of racialized nation- 114Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism” [1891] alism, see Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political in Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism and Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Pen- of Harvard University Press, 2000). guin, 2001), 128, 146. See also John Carey, The Intellec- 109Parry, “Inaugural Address,” 3. tuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the

87 19TH CENTURY MUSIC

Plate 1: Decorative illustration accompanying Hubert Parry’s “Inaugural Address” in the first issue of the Journal of the Folk-Song Society (1899): 1.

likewise echoed Morris’s portrait of an egalitar- High thoughts of God and Man, and love of ian society “in which there should be neither Man, rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, Triumphant over all those loathsome sights 119 neither idle nor overworked, neither brain sick Of wretchedness and vice. 115 brain workers, nor heart sick hand workers.” Reverberating through the writings of the Significantly, the folkloric imagination Transcendentalists, the legacy of Romantic reflected Morris’s two most profound passions: thought afforded the folk-song movement a love of “beautiful things” and a nostalgic many of its key philosophical tenets. In 116 “repulsion to the triumph of civilization.” Walden, for instance, Thoreau laments that For Morris, prosperous modern society was due to the market “the laboring man . . . has no merely a “sordid, aimless, ugly confusion,” a time to be anything but a machine” in the ser- distressing harbinger of future evils it would vice of capital, a situation antithetical to “the bring about “by sweeping away the last sur- finest qualities of our nature,” which, “like vivals of the days before the dull squalor of civ- the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by 117 ilization had settled down on the world.” the most delicate handling.”120 For Parry, folk Rereading Parry’s address in this light also song was precisely this tantalizing bloom, an reveals a clear indebtedness to literary Roman- organic manifestation of humanity’s finest ticism. The idea of reviving “love and well- qualities threatened by materialism and the thinking of our fellow-creatures” via an entrenchment of Victorian industry. embrace of country life recalls the title Much like the Transcendentalists, the folk- Wordsworth gives to Book 8 of The Prelude: song collectors united in a crusade against the “Retrospect—Love of Nature Leading to Love social ills of nineteenth-century capitalism by 118 of Man” (text of 1850). It is almost as if Parry elevating nature into a crucible of signs pointing were consciously paraphrasing the opening of toward a higher state of being. The resulting the Book’s second stanza, in which the poet discourse goes some way toward explaining why reflects on his unhappy sojourn in London: the childlike or innocent qualities of folk song With deep devotion, Nature, did I feel were so greatly prized by revivalists. As Emerson In that great City what I owed to thee, writes, “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to

Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and 119William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Faber, 1992). Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 488. More 115William Morris, How I Became a Socialist (London: broadly, see Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Min- Twentieth Century Press, 1896), 9. strelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cam- 116Ibid., 11. bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 117Ibid., 12. 120Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer 118Parry, “Inaugural Address,” 1. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 5.

88 each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy tity secured through a shared musical past. Folk ROSS 121 COLE even into the era of manhood.” Folk song rep- revivalism was shot through with such contra- Vernacular resented this delight in primitive natural forms dictions, its political vision at once radical and Song as a restorative balm that would in turn inspire reactionary—elevating (as “folk”) and demoniz- the production of art. For Emerson, art is “nature ing (as “mass”) different facets of the working- passed through the alembic of man”—a domain class population. suffering corruption “when simplicity of charac- Underpinning these anxieties regarding ter and the sovereignty of ideas” is disturbed by mass culture, unchecked capitalism, and dete- “the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of riorating popular taste was the long fallout praise.”122 from rural depopulation and trepidation over Although folk-song theory echoed Morris’s inner-city congestion, poverty, and sanitation. evangelical socialism in the guise of “love of the As the essayist Sidney J. Low remarked in the earth and the life on it,” combined with “passion Contemporary Review in 1891, “Depletion of for the history of the past of mankind” and with the rural districts is a fact which is not to hostility toward capitalist expansion, the vision be disputed . . . [England’s] life-blood is being of democracy it projected appeared less con- drained from the surrounding country-side” cerned with politics per se than with aesthet- into mining and manufacturing districts and ics.123 Rather than hunger for practical activism also into the maelstrom of Greater London.126 or a demonstrable change in position for the To many people, he continued, this “revolu- working class, Parry’s address betrayed an elitist tion has seemed one which has nothing to pastoralism in which romanticized products of relieve its disaster and gloom”: the rural folk were ranked as superior to what his We have thought of the agricultural laborer acquaintance Herbert Spencer vilified as “miser- converted into a town-dweller, the yokel torn from able drawing-room ballads and vulgar music-hall 124 his hamlet to live in the sweltering black slums of songs.” the East-end of a great city. The limbs that were A paradoxical politics therefore lay dormant “made in England”—on its healthy ploughlands and under the surface, an ethical utopianism mis- fresh meadows—must stunt and dwindle in narrow trustful of urban populism and of its reflection courts and filthy alleys; the children, who should in the flourishing mass culture of an “unregen- have pulled the honeysuckle in the lanes and erate public.”125 The community Parry wished hunted for birds’ nests in the hedges, will tumble in to see involved a peaceable unification of artists the gutter outside the public-house. As the process and docile country dwellers in place of the liberal continues, almost the whole population will be jammed into some score of monster towns . . . and economics generating both wealthy industrial- tens of millions will be exposed to the physical and ists and “workmen who execute”—in another mental blight of the “submerged” slum-dweller.127 guise, the potentially threatening forces of unionized labor. The Folk-Song Society thus rep- What was occurring during the 1890s, resented a flight away from socio-economic however, was an unprecedented movement antagonism within the body politic—the “strife” away from such areas into the suburbs. This Parry depicts between head and hands—in the new demographic trend formed the primary service of a mythical and classless national iden- impetus behind Parry’s concern with urban degeneracy. Drawing on the recently published Census 121Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” [1836] in Ralph Waldo Report, Low noted that inner-city slum Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin, 2003), 38. dwellers “are obeying the great law of centrifu- 122Ibid., 47, 51. gal attraction, and quitting the inner recesses 123Morris, How I Became a Socialist, 12. of the metropolis to find new homes in the 124Herbert Spencer, “The Origin of Music,” Mind 15/60 (1890): 449–68, 465. 125Parry, “Inaugural Address,” 1. Similar themes are explored in Julian Onderdonk, “The Composer and Society: Family, 126Sidney J. Low, “The Rise of the Suburbs: A Lesson of Politics, Nation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan the Census,” Contemporary Review 60 (October 1891): Williams, ed. Alain Frogley and Aidan J. Thomson (Cam- 545–58, 546–47. bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 9–28. 127Ibid., 547–48.

89 128 19TH outskirts.” The suburbs, he affirmed, repre- “unhealthy” cultural wastelands occupied by CENTURY MUSIC sented the future of the city across the devel- those enamoured of mere “musical slang.” oped world as segments of the working class Such rhetoric bore witness not only to unde- and lower-middle-class population colonized niable social ills, but also to widespread fears new areas of overflow within commutable dis- of social, aesthetic, and racial decline. tance of their employment. The country’s life- Demanding urgent reform in 1900, the journal- blood was therefore in truth “pouring into the ist Robert Donald noted that under the clamor long arms of brick and mortar and cheap of reporting on the Boer War “the needless stucco that are feeling their way out to the Sur- waste of life in the struggle for existence in the rey moors, and the Essex flats, and the Hert- slums of our large cities goes on, silently and fordshire copses”; not one, Low aptly pre- unseen”: diseases spread, children “die by the dicted, “but a dozen Croydons will form a cir- thousand before they know how to suffer,” and cle of detached forts round the central strong- “degeneracy—moral and physical—poisons an hold” of the capital.129 ever-widening circle.”134 “Unless the work- Whereas Low believed this resettlement men’s colonies in the suburbs are built under would mitigate any unease caused by the better conditions,” Donald stressed, “we will “great exodus from the fields” and should not be simply manufacturing more slums for the be cause for embarrassment, folk-song devo- future,” particularly given that health laws in tees saw a very different picture.130 A review such areas are “not strictly enforced” and that of the Society’s inaugural meeting in the Man- the Building Acts are “nearly always a dead let- chester Guardian singled out Parry’s likening ter.”135 This sensitivity to the idea of degener- of “the latest abomination from the music- ation was one of the foremost obsessions among halls” to a “jerry-built slum suburb” for praise, European intellectuals at the time—exemplified extending this metaphor by suggesting that by Max Nordau’s Entartung, a book attempting folk song was accordingly “a noble memorial to identify the pathological aspects of contem- of the past.”131 A similar piece in the Musical porary art, urbanization, and social decadence, Standard praised Parry’s “eloquent and and their baleful effects on the human body.136 forcible comparison,” noting that his address An 1892 article in the National Observer enti- “was naturally much applauded.”132 Refusing tled “Degeneracy,” for instance, bemoaned the to be reconciled with a thoroughly urbanized “plain,” “under-sized,” and “ill-made” figures population, Parry was one of those critics who, in Low’s words, inquire with dismay “where 134 the strength and stamina of the race will go” Robert Donald, “Housing the Poor: Experiments and Problems,” Contemporary Review 77 (March 1900): and “regard this abandonment of the land as 323–33, 323. something abnormal, unnatural, and as it were 135Ibid., 333. 136 accidental, which ought not to be accepted as Max Nordau, Entartung [Degeneration], ed. Karin 133 Tebben (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013). On the history underly- a permanent condition.” Indeed, the crux of ing such work, see Gregory Claeys, “The ‘Survival of the Parry’s argument relied upon mapping what Fittest’ and the Origins of Social Darwinism,” Journal of had previously been associated only with nox- the History of Ideas 61/2 (2000): 223–40; Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, ious inner-city environments onto these newly 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cam- built suburbs, now also branded as slums and bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Evolution and Victorian Culture, ed. Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1996). The beginnings of musicology are entan- 128Ibid., 550. gled with such ideas. See Alexander Rehding, “The Quest 129Ibid., 550, 551. for the Origins of Music in Germany Circa 1900,” Journal 130Ibid., 552. of the American Musicological Society 53/2 (2000): 131“Our London Correspondence,” Manchester Guardian, 345–85; Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project: Culture, 3 February 1899: 7. See also Lara Baker Whelan, Class, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Oxford: Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era Oxford University Press, 2007); and Rachel Mundy, “Evo- (New York: Routledge, 2010). lutionary Categories and Musical Style from Adler to 132“The Folk-Song Society,” 81. America,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 133Low, “The Rise of the Suburbs,” 553. 67/3 (2014): 735–67.

90 of London’s working class, observing by con- to repair its exhausted vitality?”141 Replenish- ROSS COLE trast that their forebears “were ruddy, upright ing the imperial metropolis and delivering men Vernacular peasants” epitomizing a village life that had “with the stalwart frames, the well-chiselled Song afforded mankind its “highest develop- features, the straight limbs of the descendants ment.”137 of the Norse and Saxon tribes that settled on Incorporating the criminological theories of the soil,” rural inhabitants—and, by analogy, Cesare Lombroso, such views were often their pastoral songs—were potential redeemers inseparable from a rejection of Victorian mass of the nation and indeed of Empire.142 entertainment and the new leisure pursuits of One writer nevertheless spotted the paradox a burgeoning lower-middle class.138 The prison secreted within this project of revivalism. Folk physician Isabel Foard argued in 1899, for music was believed to be the unique and her- instance, that Britain was descending into metic expression of national identity in a atavism due to inherited weaknesses of Britain that had for centuries extended its col- physique and intellect. The result, she argued, onizing dominion across the globe. Given such was “a mechanical mind bereft of its argumen- “overlapping territories” the country was thus tative, imaginative, and individual powers” the product of what Edward Said describes as abetted by “the slight sketchy novel, without “intertwined histories.”143 The same year that plot, appealing merely to the senses,” “variety Parry delivered his inaugural address to the entertainment,” and “the numberless maga- Society, Baughan wrote the following under zines . . . of a light nature, with no attempt at the title “A Plea for Cosmopolitanism”: literary effort or style, turned out for the read- 139 It will, perhaps, seem rather far fetched to trace ing of the million.” This debilitating culture the influence of our genius for colonization on our of “rapidity” and a “growing inability to con- music, but in these days, when our foremost centrate ideas,” Foard noted, was also due (as composers show a decided inclination to apologize 140 Parry implied) to “the influence of alcohol.” for the cosmopolitan character of British music, and Parry’s remedy for such malaise was the lev- to dig into the mine of Folk-song, it is necessary to elheaded, restorative power of folk song. point out that Great Britain is not as other nations, Understood as an instantiation of the rural that her sons have carried her flag to every part more broadly, folk song offered a means to reju- of the habitable globe, and that the country itself is nothing more than a large warehouse with a venate the deteriorating cultural life of the 144 nation just as influxes of rural laborers them- thriving brokerage business attached. selves might revitalize the ailing and enervated It would be absurd, Baughan continues, to sup- racial stock of conurbations. As Low points pose that such a history had no effect on national out, in an epoch of “urban supremacy, the character, and “equally absurd to speak of one greatness of the towns has been made less by character” given the self-evidently hybrid nature townsmen than by immigrants from the coun- of human descent.145 In agreement with Parry try”: “What will become of the feeble anæmic regarding the general trajectory of musical devel- urban population,” he inquires, “when there opment, Baughan nevertheless proposes that the can be no more immigration from the villages

141Low, “The Rise of the Suburbs,” 553. 137“Degeneracy,” National Observer, 18 June (1892): 142Ibid. It is here that the folk-song movement betrays its 114–15, 115. deep and undeniable links to the nascent culture of Euro- 138See Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian Eng- pean fascism. See Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: land: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Berkeley: 1830–1885 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) and University of California Press, 1986) and Sternhell, The Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Maisel (New (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). I deal with this issue Paul Knepper, The Invention of International Crime: A at greater length in Cole, “On the Politics of Folk Song Global Issue in the Making, 1881–1914 (Basingstoke: Pal- Theory.” grave Macmillan, 2010). 143Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1. 139Isabel Foard, “The Power of Heredity,” Westminster 144Edward Baughan, “A Plea for Cosmopolitanism,” Review 151/5 (1899): 538–53, 538. Monthly Musical Record 28/326 (1898): 25–26, 25. 140Ibid. 145Ibid.

91 19TH introduction of native song into contemporary sion one step beyond a “savage” phase of CENTURY 146 MUSIC composition is an artificial “masquerade.” As humanity, folk songs were “the spontaneous the outpouring of “a people less fortunate and utterances of the musical impulse of the peo- lower in the scale of human culture” containing ple” standing in direct contrast to the “vul- “little of that healthier, broader, and more sub- garised and weakened portions of the music of lime thought that is characteristic of man when the leisured classes.”151 Denied a voice of their educated and civilized,” folk song was out of own, the folk became the vicarious mouth- touch with “modern complexity” and its devo- piece of a fearful establishment, conduits of a tees too inclined to think that “all the virtues of radical, unsullied, and hence restorative pop- mankind lie in the simplicity of the untutored ulist sensibility to counter the false and dis- mind.”147 concerting populism of the metropolis. Utiliz- What Baughan might also have pointed out ing a framework derived from evolutionary was that this “genius for colonization” was philosophy and the colonial enterprise, Parry manifest at the very heart of the folk-song pro- was able to establish a vision of humanity con- ject. It was only through colonialist discourse taining within itself demonstrable traces of its that folk music could be classified as the prod- own progression from premodern barbarism to uct of “primitive” minds. Indeed, the entire modern civilization. Folk song relied upon this field was predicated on what de Certeau postulate to stage a dialectical return, employ- describes as an ethnological rectangle: orality ing traces of primitive “folk” culture as a (art practiced within “a primitive, savage, or redemptive antidote to the ills of fin-de-siècle traditional society”), spatiality (a “synchronic modernity. picture” of that society), alterity (difference arising from a “cultural break”), and uncon- A Geography of the Forgotten sciousness (“the status of collective phenom- ena”).148 The ethnological or folkloric specta- Written in collaboration with Dominique Julia tor’s role is then to collate, translate, and orga- and Jacques Revel, de Certeau’s essay “The nize this culture into notated documents. It Beauty of the Dead” underscores a paradox was this ethnological nexus that allowed Parry central to the idea of popular and, by exten- and others to position folk song as the deepest sion, folk culture. The social function of dis- wellspring of European musical heritage and course on such milieux, he states, is to “con- thus as a potentially restorative force. ceal what it claims to show.”152 Grounding his Echoing what Johannes Fabian pinpoints as argument in the work of Charles Nisard—head the “allochronic” tendencies of early anthro- of the French Ministry of Police’s Commission pology, the folkloric imagination was indebted for the Examination of Chapbooks during the to the historiographical model Parry outlined 1850s—de Certeau demonstrates that what in The Evolution of the Art of Music—a book historians of the era have taken to be a culture drawing on a teleological vision of develop- of the people was in fact the result of sys- ment indebted to Spencerian theory.149 For tematic inventorying, censorship, and prohibi- Parry, music progressed “parallel to the general tion by municipal authorities. Studies of street development of capacities of all kinds in the literature were predicated on the selective human race.”150 As a pure, aboriginal, and expurgation of an object reserved only for autonomous outpouring of collective expres- enlightened specialists. Purged of immorality and potential revolutionary danger, popular material was the idealized result of political 146 Ibid. discipline and subjugation. By the time of the 147Ibid., 26. 148De Certeau, The Writing of History, 209. 149Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropol- ogy Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University 151Ibid., 80. Press, 2014), 37; see also Mundy, “Evolutionary Cate- 152Michel de Certeau, “The Beauty of the Dead: Nisard,” gories.” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Mas- 150Hubert Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music (Lon- sumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), don: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1896), 48. 119–36, 121.

92 Third Republic, however, a shift had occurred ready to give up the yearning to collect these ROSS COLE in which the popular became less an alarming disparate intonations and expressions “under Vernacular terrain in need of correction than the locus the sign of a ‘Voice,’ or of a ‘Culture’ of its Song of a cohesive national identity. The birth of own—or of the great Other’s.”155 To put it in folklore “ensured the cultural assimilation of de Certeau’s terminology, late Victorian folk- a henceforth reassuring museum.”153 Nonethe- loric praxis functioned as a strategy—a panop- less, before becoming a legitimate object of tic operation transforming “the uncertainties scholarly interest, popular culture had first to of history into readable spaces” by filling the be filtered through the instrumentalizing gaze undocumented lacunae of everyday life with of certified gatekeepers. ideological speculation.156 In this scheme, the The story of folk song in England echoes folk appeared as native noble savages, caught this long history of Romantic reimagination. in a camouflaged violence that oscillated As with France, “a political faction in search “between voyeurism and pedagogy” and of a new alliance” employed the supposedly pointed toward “the reservation and the childlike or primitive qualities of rural folk- museum.”157 Predicated upon a quixotic pur- lore as a means to “put the peasant back in suit of lost origins, de Certeau reminds us, the the worker,” elevating democracy while vocabulary of folklore defines “less the con- simultaneously guarding against the latent tent of a popular culture than the historian’s threat of mass insurrection.154 Set up as the gaze itself.”158 antidote to demographic change and escalat- The relations and regularities established ing urban industrialization, the imagined cor- between institutions, material culture, enun- pus of “the folk” proved to be the perfect ciations, and concepts within the folkloric tabula rasa upon which the historiographical, imagination form the basis of what Michel political, and ethnological fantasies of the fin Foucault characterizes as a “discursive for- de siècle could be inscribed. mation.”159 In order to establish credibility, The voice of the people has most often been de Certeau proposes, “Discourse binds itself constituted by its repression—through selec- to the institutional structure that legitimates tion, reclassification, regulation, dislocation, it in the eyes of the public”—in this case, writing, and censorship. We thus return to to organizations such as the Folk-Song Soci- the idea that folklore is popular culture under ety.160 Although the folk never existed, they erasure, or in specifically musical terms: folk were brought into being through discourse song = vernacular song. Folk song concealed itself. Folk song and the folk were conjured the very thing it claimed to exemplify. up via the discursive strategies that claimed Through folk song we do not hear the voice merely to describe them. Folk song devotees of the people, but rather popular voices mod- nevertheless saw themselves as redeemers of ulated by a series of gatekeeping decisions. an art on the brink of a descent into obscurity Rather than presenting the sound of a com- and ruin. Their vision of folk song became a munal throng, folk song emerged from a series fulcrum between the commercial ruckus of of highly mediated encounters with unique broadside culture and the establishment of an and often exceptional singers such as Henry anti-commercial pastoralism that longed to Burstow and the Copper brothers. These fig- ures became entrapped within a twofold synecdoche in which an individual singer or 155De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 132. 156 song was made to stand for “the folk” as a Ibid., 36. 157De Certeau, “The Beauty of the Dead,” 125. See also whole, and “the folk” in turn were made to Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: stand for the idealized political community of University of California Press, 2001). 158 the nation. We must, de Certeau asserts, be De Certeau, “The Beauty of the Dead,” 129. 159Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 130. 153Ibid., 124. 160Michel de Certeau, “History: Science and Fiction,” in 154Ibid., 124–25. Heterologies, 199–21, 207.

93 19TH enfold the unselfconscious primitivism of Pound summed up this revisionist argument CENTURY MUSIC these once prodigal low Others into the in an article for PMLA, charting how the his- national culture as a remedy for the encroach- tory of Romantic efforts to conceive of ments of modernity, technological progress, humanity en masse had led toward “the and the inexorable flow of capital. Intended as bizarre belief in a collective soul which is not an instrument of social metamorphosis, folk to be found in the nature of the souls of the song became an institutionally endorsed individuals which compose the social group, means of animating “the folk” from the puri- but which in some mystic sense enwraps the fied and reforged residues of vernacular cul- individuals in its all-obscuring fog.”164 “If his- ture—a domain that first needed to be tory and indeed ethnology betray clearly one notated, categorized, and sanitized in order fact,” she affirms, “it is that there is no such to count as folklore. Collectors at the fin de ‘mental homogeneity’ among men. . . . Con- siècle acted as the channels through which scious effort, cool judgment, and creative this “folk” culture had to pass in order to be intelligence are gifts of men, not of mobs.”165 understood as such. The resultant folk were Pound was at pains to accentuate that schol- required only ever to be artisanal producers ars must resist the temptation of forcing Oth- or bearers of an endangered tradition, never ers to speak through gestures of cultural ven- alienated consumers of commercial enter- triloquism: “Where the primitivist seeks to tainment. Theirs was the very opposite of a replace human thought by dancing puppets, new identity developing within urban mass the critic of the tradition endeavors to single society. out, from the midst of puppetdom, creative We should not forget that strong voices of human intelligences.”166 dissent have always accompanied the folk- The institutionalization of folk song as an loric imagination. In a polemical 1921 mono- object of intrigue at the fin de siècle exhibits graph entitled Poetic Origins and the Ballad, precisely the failing that Pound diagnosed—a for example, the brilliant but overlooked cultural dramaturgy in which the intricacies American scholar Louise Pound proclaimed of vernacular singing are replaced by shadow that the notion of the spontaneous oral gen- play. Pound was not content merely to eration of songs by a folk community was a deconstruct such representations, however, “fatuously speculative” hypothesis that had but also advocated searching out moments of thrown the entire field of literary studies out “creative intelligence” or what de Certeau of kilter.161 The fact “that songs have been would later refer to as tactics. In contrast to preserved in remote districts and among the strategies of control, tactics are covert and humble,” she stresses, “is no proof that they guileful acts of resistance, often depending on were composed in such places and by such linguistic dexterity and wit that develop from people”; rather, this material was “literature positions of weakness.167 Dissatisfied with ‘for’ not ‘by’ the people.”162 Given that many views of society founded upon hegemonic collectors had focused their “salvage” on the power, passivity, and domination, de Certeau Child ballads, she notes, they were liable to employed this concept as a way to theorize ignore “many related types of song of equal quotidian patterns of consumption, use, and or greater currency” among the population.163 movement as acts of subaltern agency that breach or trespass across the disciplinary structures that Foucault identified. This 161Louise Pound, Poetic Origins and the Ballad (New perspective offers a way to rethink the history York: Macmillan, 1921), 35, 34. For biographical informa- of vernacular song by resisting romanticized tion, see Robert Cochran, Louise Pound: Scholar, Ath- lete, Feminist Pioneer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 162Pound, Poetic Origins, 91, 106. This last phrase is a 164Louise Pound, “The Term ‘Communal’,” PMLA 39/2 deliberate inversion of a theory expounded by Francis (1924): 440–54, 444. Barton Gummere in Old English Ballads (Boston: Ginn 165Ibid., 444–46. & Company, 1894). 166Ibid., 445–46. 163Pound, Poetic Origins, 120. 167De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37.

94 or anachronistic views of laboring people and Abstract. ROSS This article foregrounds discrepancies between ver- COLE transforming “what was represented as a Vernacular matrix-force of history into a mobile infinity nacular singing in England and the work of London’s Song of tactics.”168 In so doing, we might rescue the Folk-Song Society during the 1890s. Figures such as marginalized histories of vernacular singing Lucy Broadwood, Kate Lee, and Hubert Parry acted as gatekeepers through whom folk culture had to pass from the strategic operations of folk song. As in order to be understood as such. Informed by colo- Mary Brown writes, echoing Pound, by nialist epistemology, socialist radicalism, and liter- reconfiguring and detaching this field of ary Romanticism, what may be termed the “folkloric inquiry “from the fanciful and intriguing imagination” concealed the very thing it claimed to imagined past” we might resuscitate popular identify. Folk song, thus produced, represents the singing “as a fluid, dynamic practice more popular voice under erasure. Situated as the antidote nearly reflecting its lived reality.”169 This to degeneration, burgeoning mass consumer culture, lived reality is what folk song has re- and escalating urbanization, the folk proved to be the peatedly silenced. Searching out, illuminating, perfect tabula rasa upon which the historiograph- and recuperating these blank spots and mur- ical, political, and ethnological fantasies of the fin murings—what de Certeau describes as a de siècle could be inscribed. Positioned as a restora- tive bulwark against the shifting tides of modernity, “geography of the forgotten”—is what the the talismanic folk and their songs were temporal study of vernacular song now anachronisms conjured up via the discursive strate- demands. gies that attempted to describe them. Increased atten- tion should hence be paid to singers such as Henry Burstow and the Copper brothers of Rottingdean in order to rescue their histories from the conceptual 168Ibid., 41. 169Mary Ellen Brown, “Placed, Replaced, or Misplaced? apparatus of folk song. The Ballads’ Progress,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Keywords: Folk-Song Society, fin de siècle, Britain, Interpretation 47/2 (2006): 115–29, 123. popular culture, colonialism

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