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Originally published in 1968. The author, a well-known contemporary and friend of folklorist Katharine M. Briggs, collected a tremendous store of folk music material over many years and eventually decided to put some of it on permanent record. This book comprises a cross-section of rescued melodies dating back to medieval days and up to the Victorian early ballads. It describes individual folk singers in Somerset in great detail as personal accounts and documents their lyrics and their tunes, which are all together at the end of the volume.

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9781138953468

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I am not a musician, nor an expert, nor an academic student in the matter of these old songs. I sang them myself for my own enjoyment and therefore they comprise a cross-section of rescued melodies dating back to medieval days and up to the Victorian early ballads. Very few can be less than a hundred years old, many of my fellow singers reaching back to a youth spent in George IV’s reign, and I do not think they have been collected before. To those who love old songs and their singers I hope they will give as much pleasure as I found in sixty years and more of listening to, and singing, their songs and sharing their company.Among many country people there still lingers the age-old dislike of being mentioned by name. ‘I’ll sing for ‘ee gladly but yew mustn’t put my name to it.’ I have, therefore, out of respect for this feeling and those of friends and relatives, substituted other names for those of the singers described.

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