Folk Music and Church Music

PDB11 and I have recently been reading The Captain’s Apprentice by Caroline Davison.  This is a fascinating story of two people who led very different lives: Robert Eastick, a Norfolk teenager who in 1856 died at sea under suspicious circumstances after prolonged abuse by the ship’s captain; and Ralph Vaughan Williams, composer and folk-song collector, who in 1905 heard a ballad, ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’, sung by a Norfolk fisherman, James ‘Duggie’ Carter, a childhood neighbour of Eastick, telling the story of a cabin-boy tortured to death by his captain.

But it is more than a biography.  It is also a story of how songs and stories mutate over time and are adapted for different purposes.  Vaughan Williams assumed that because the version of ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’ that he heard contained local references, it must have been about a local event.  In fact, as Davison explains, versions of the ballad had been sung on both sides of the Atlantic since before 1800 (the earliest written version dates back to 1768), inspired by a number of real-life cases in which captains had tortured and murdered a crew member, often the cabin-boy.

Equally, tunes are re-purposed.  As Davison describes, she first encountered the tune of ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’ in instrumental form, as part of Vaughan Williams’ Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1.  Much of the book reflects on her own early encounters with folk-song, and the ways that a song can be sung very differently in different contexts: for example, the Scottish folk song ‘Kishmul’s Galley’, which she had learned (in English) from her mother and experienced as ‘a mournful ballad’ had originally been (in Gaelic) a vigorous work-song used to keep workers in a steady rhythm, and a local band in the Hebrides, the Vatersay boys, play it as ‘a rumbustious instrumental version’.

One of the passages that struck PDB11 and me as the most surprising was the author’s comment that

‘In contemporary Western music we are accustomed to lyrics being sung to a tune exclusively associated with them.  We wouldn’t expect to hear “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Imagine” sung to a different melody: the two elements are inextricably linked to make a whole.  In the folk tradition this was not the case.’

 

To us as churchgoers, and especially to PDB11 as church organist, it is a commonplace of life that a song can have many tunes and a tune may work for many different lyrics.  When we were choosing music for our wedding, PDB11 suggested ‘Gracious Spirit, Holy Ghost’ by Christopher Wordsworth and we experimented with playing and singing it to the tunes ‘Charity’ by John Stainer and ‘Capetown’ by Friedrich Filitz to decide which we preferred.  We settled on ‘Charity’, which seemed appropriate as the hymn is an adaptation of Paul’s famous description of divine love.

Sometimes PDB11 offers the congregation a choice of tunes and asks us which one we would prefer to sing.  Alternatively, he just picks the tune he hopes most people will be familiar with or find singable, and sometimes plays another tune for the same hymn before or after the service.

Church may be one of the few places left where ordinary people like me, who aren’t talented enough to be professional musicians or even enthusiastic part-timers like PDB11 (who, in addition to being church organist, is a composer, a member of a choir and an orchestra, founder of a wind quintet, and until recently a member of a folk band) get to perform music instead of just listening to it.  In the modern age, most of us don’t sing as we work; we have the radio on instead, playing pop songs. 

The same applies when we go out to the pub in the evening.  There might be a radio or television, or there might occasionally be a live rock band if the landlord encourages such things, or, if you are lucky, there might be silence.  But what isn’t likely to happen is for the pub’s customers to start singing together.  There isn’t likely to be a piano.

Most people don’t memorise songs, even ones they are familiar with.  Last weekend when I was visiting a friend, he tried singing a few lines of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and a few lines of ‘Dancing Queen’, and I joined in as best I could, but neither of us could remember much of the tune or lyrics of either.  PDB11 declined to comment (as he is even less familiar with pop music than I am, therefore didn’t know precisely how they were meant to sound) but listening to us can’t have been a pleasant experience for him.

To be honest, I do sometimes sing or whistle when I’m out walking on my own.  Passing by a village might remind me of Tom Paxton’s ‘Passing through Tulsa at Four in the Morning’, or fly-tipping might remind me of Flanders and Swann’s ‘Bedstead Men’ as much as convolvulus in the hedgerows reminds me of their poignant and political ‘Misalliance’ – which somehow feels as if it ought to be a traditional folk song, even when I know that it was written in the 20^th century. 

Singing to oneself like this, as old labourers quoted in Davison’s book recall, used to be a normal thing to do until the early 20^th century, singing or whistling while striding down the village street, ploughing or making shoes, but ‘If thee was to sing out like that down Enstone nowadays they’d think thee’d just come out of the Bell and lock ’ee up in Oxford Castle.’  I seem to have got away without being locked up so far – but equally, I have to accept that people know I’m weird.

But church gives people licence to sing together without worrying about being rated on their performance, without hoping to be on television or fearing being sneered at by a celebrity judge.  It may be the first place where many of us encounter a range of tunes.  Davison describes how Vaughan Williams felt that, although he had appropriated many folk-songs which he made money out of collecting and the singers made little or no money out of teaching to him, he felt that ‘Exchange was no robbery,’ as he was giving these local melodies to the wider world by setting hymns to them which would be sung in churches across the country.  Even in the 1890s, as Vaughan Williams commented, for many people ‘the music the Church gave them each week was the only music in their lives’.

Setting hymns to existing folk tunes is nothing new.  Judging by the notes in the Book of Psalms, where many of the psalms are listed as ‘to “Lilies”’, ‘to “A Dove on Distant Oaks”’, ‘to “The Doe in the Morning”’ and so on, poets in Old Testament times were already writing religious verses to the tunes of popular folk songs, even if both the original words and the tunes are now lost and we will never know what music David played to King Saul to soothe him when he was agitated.

Church isn’t just the place where some of us first encounter traditional folk tunes like ‘O Waly Waly’ (used in Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New for several hymns, including one setting of ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’, ‘With My Love on the Road’ as ‘Be Thou My Vision’ and ‘Bunessan’ as ‘Morning Has Broken’.  It was also where I first encountered some tunes by classical composers.  I first experienced Handel’s ‘See, the Conquering Hero Comes’ as ‘Thine Be the Glory’  and Jeremiah Clarke’s ‘The Prince of Denmark’s March’  as ‘This Earth Belongs to God’.

One point that Davison doesn’t pick up on is that the influence between folk culture and religion goes in both directions.  She repeatedly refers to the folk ballad ‘Dives and Lazarus’  which Vaughan Williams quoted in his English Folk Song Suite, famously used as the basis for his classical piece Five Variants on ‘Dives and Lazarus’, and to which, under the title ‘Kingsfold’ he set various hymns including ‘I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say’.  Davison notes that the song’s commentary on the selfishness of the rich towards the poor has a lot in common with other folk songs.  But what she doesn’t mention is that the story of Dives and Lazarus was a parable told by Jesus.

For the minority of people in Britain today who attend church these days, even churches that don’t have a properly trained choir offer a basic introduction to music and a chance to sing (unless they belong to a denomination that prefers silent meditation).  I don’t know whether music plays a similar role in the worship of other religions.  But I wonder what the equivalent is for non-religious people.