 Felly maen nhw'n gwybod a'n rwy'n cael ei wneud yn fwy o'r gwrthoedd i'ch gweithio'r bobl yn cael eu bod yn fwy oherwydd fel ystodol yw'r corwysau yn ymlaen. Felly rwy'n cael eu cyfnodd i'n gweithio'ch cymdechrau a'r cyfrifol sy'n cael eu cyfnodd i'r hynny. Mae'n cael eu cyfrifol yn ymlaen i'r cyfrifol. If you were to go anywhere in London, I'm sure you'd believe that only a very small number of carols exist in the world, you'd hear them all over the place, and that's what we think, in a time and time again we hear these every year the same sort of carols. But I think singing at Christmas is actually as old as Christmas itself pretty much, so that's a very very long time for this material to be out in circulation. Now clearly initially we're talking about singing in church at the Christmas period, and in England this stopped during the reformation for a period of time as you probably know, and from about 1780 really at that time the only carol that really was sung in churches was Welsh shepherds, that was the only one that was kind of accepted in Anglican services, until we get later the Victorian period, and that's when Christmas takes off doesn't it, with dickens and Christmas cards and Christmas trees, and we start to sort of almost create a carolin culture in a church context. However, in parallel to all this church music, these church carols, there is a separate line of development, and that is traditional and folk carols, and this is really what I want to focus on today, it's not what was sung per se inside the church, it's what the people were singing outside. Okay, we're going to start by thinking about folk carols, what do I mean by this, and I mean these are the carols collected from the mouths of the people, so they've been passed down through families, through communities, through what we know as oral transmission, not written down until a raft of posse actually a Victorian Edwardian collectors started going to find them. So this is a bit of sort of university challenge, I need you to name these people, here we go, this is your start of a 10 ladies and gentlemen, who is this? Oh top of the class, those girls over there, this is Wraithful Williams indeed, he was collecting in Sussex and we'll be finding a little bit more about particularly one of the carols he collected. Good guess but not Lucy, this is Janet Blunt, she was an adabria in Oxfordshire and she was collecting folk lawn traditions round and about including Morris tunes as well as dances and songs, oh yes, Sabre and Beringold, this is the vicar of Lou Trenchard in Devon, he was collecting on Xmore, some of you will recognise him, very interesting character indeed, if I was to go da da da da da da da da da da da da, there we are, he made a lot of money I think out of that Morris dance tune. That's Singlish Country Gardens and Percy Granger, this is a lady called Miss Gilchrist who is working in the north west of England just to show that men and women were very much engaged in this activity at the time. These are three brothers from Dorset, these are the Hammond brothers who are collecting down there, they were also active in Somerset. We've had her name, folk collecting is tiring as you see, we've got Lucy Broadwood here taking a rest. She's of the Broadway piano manufacturing family down in Sussex, so Lucy Broadwood, a founding member of the Folk Song Society, a very active collector as were her uncles before her in the mid-19th century. We've got all these people collecting looking for folk songs and amongst that wonderful collection material they're finding carols, but perhaps the greatest of them all is this gentleman. This is Sussle Sharp, a London-based music teacher, you've all no doubt heard of Sussle Sharp. Here he is on his bicycle all about to go off collecting. You probably look, he's got his notepad in his pocket ready to go. He's actually probably got his camera in the other pocket, that's not true, someone's taking this photograph, probably using his camera. He took photographs of his singers as well and we're going to be seeing some of those as we go through this talk this morning, this afternoon. Sharp amongst his travelling to collect folk songs, starting in 1903, he came across carols and he started to publish them and he put together a collection of folk carols which he dedicated to Wraithfawr Williams. They've been collaborating for some time on various publications and in 1911 he published these. Now I want you to have a look down this list and see if you recognise any of these. I'm guessing probably only a few because we tend not to sing these now and I'm not sure why. The New Year's Carol, I've highlighted in red, I'm going to sing to you now because it's got an exquisite tune and I want to talk to you a little bit about the singers behind it. Awake of Awezy's Souls and isn't that a beautiful melody? Absolutely beautiful. Well his Susser Sharp's Field Notebook where he actually wrote down the words of that carol and this comes from two singers. I want you to look at the bottom as well, we've got Walter Perry there written. This is the address of the next person he's going to see and we'll come across him in a minute. So his Susser Sharp's Fair Copy of the Music of Awake of Awezy's Souls. Now when Sharp collected these carols he was very diligent about his sources. So you'll see you've got Sam Bradley and Seth Bandral of Lillishaw. You've got the date October 27th 1911. So with Sharp's collecting we have this massive data which we can find out a lot more about our singers and the context they sang in. Now we know that these two sang this together in unison and there's a nice little story that goes with this. And Sharp says this in his preface to English folk carols. Christmas caroling is associated with the minds of folk singers with the custom of house to house singing. Only a few weeks ago I asked two old men and I believe it was these two who were singing to me whether they knew a certain carol. One of them said that he did. The other, the elder of the two shook his head doubtfully whereupon the youngest singer stood up and dragging his companion up beside him said encouragingly stand up and think you've got snow in your boots it'll come to you all right. And it did. And that tells us a little bit about context and about when you sing and why you sing and who you're with and how you sing. And this gentleman could only sing that carol when he was in the right context, which I think is quite interesting. Beautiful carol from Sharpshire. OK, we all know this one. This is the game, Sharksfield notes. This is the tune of the Holly and the Ivy, which you'll recognise. Now what you may not know is that the tune we know and love, this particular one, the Holly and the Ivy, the one you know, is from Mrs Anna Clayton of Chippin Camden in Gloucestershire. These songs we learned at school, we never really thought about where they came from. I certainly didn't. And so what we've got here is a pure folk carol collected from the mouths of the people. And it's one that we know and love. Now she actually was a chimney sweep, quite interesting, you find her on the census. But that tune is exactly the one that we sing today. We find it on broad sides. These carols clearly have an origin. The difference between the composed carols and the carols I'm talking about is that these are sort of a collective. They have a collective background. They go through the community and they come out the other side and they're enjoyed and shared. They're not written down on paper. They come through that oral tradition. However, they do have a point of origin clearly. One of those points of origin are these broad sides. Here's one with Holly and the Ivy. This is a great website, by the way. If you're interested in broad sides and ballads, go to the Bodleian. They have a fantastic website on ballads. So here's one of the examples. So we're taking this carol back to the early 19th century. I particularly like the next broad side because of the typo. You might want to read down and have a look at the chorus. He's clearly switched the words around the printer. They're very grown there instead of organ, I see. But these things are wonderful. The printed on one side, but they have these words. They don't have tunes. So the tunes come from somewhere else. The words that Sharp took down from Mrs Clayton are slightly different to that broad side. And this is why I think we really get close to the person because get nearer to the vernacular, the language that people are using. And Sharp seems to us to be very diligent about taking down the words as the people spoke them. So if we read this, the Holly and the Ivy are both now well grown of all the trees that's in the world, the Holly bears the crown. The Holly bears the bark, as bitter as any gawd, and Mary bears sweet Jesus, child Christ for two redeemers all. The Holly bears the berry, as red as any blood, and Mary bears sweet Jesus Christ to do us sinners good. I like it. It's a vernacular poetry and it takes us to the people and I absolutely love it. OK, which cowl are we going to look at next, do you think? It is. I saw three ships. This has one of the most fascinating histories for me within the cowl canon, if you will. In William Sands publication Christmas Cowls Ancient and Modern, we find reference to this cowl. It's an early 19th century collection of cowls that he purports to collector that we don't have the sources. There are also definitely some improvisation and composition going on in here. He divides this into three parts. So we have ancient cowls and Christmas songs. We have cowl stories in the west of England and some French provincial cowls. This is about the time, remember, look at the day 1833. Ten years later we've got Dickens Christmas Cowl being published. So you're looking at a time when this book actually was becoming very, very popular and a lot of people would have known the cowls contained therein. So in it we find, in William Sands volume, the familiar cowl that we know. I saw three ships and you see it on the first line there. The tune is the one that we know. Familiar to us? However, the story behind this is really fascinating. In his preface to that volume, Sandys cites Joseph Ritson, who's collected a version of the three ships come sailing in. And this is what his words are. There comes a ship for sailing then, St Michael and the Steersmen, St John sat in the horn either stern, our Lord harped, our Lady sang and all the bells of heaven they rang on Christmas Sunday morning. So that's one ship and a lot of people in it. So it's pretty crowded. So we have this in that collection of Scottish songs by Ritson. So we're going back a little further. And he says this was sung in the 16th century at Christmas time. So we're taking it back a little further. Now the plot thickens because we have this gentleman coming into the equation. This is Sabine Beringold again, who is the Vick of Lou Trenchard. He was sent a version of this cowl from a chap called Lewis Davis of Pinner, who was a friend of his. And Beringold published the version he was sent in a publication he called at Garland Country Songs in 1895. Now this song was collected from a boatman on the River Humber. And it's a version of the cowl about the three crons. Now the three crons. Douglas Bryce in his publication The Folk Cowl of England associates crons with the skull. And what he's talking about is the three magi, the three kings. So here we are. We've got a cowl collected in the late 19th century on the Humber from a boatman about ship sailing in, which is quite interesting in so right, about the magi. And we're so we're going back to a time of legend. Now the legend associated with the three crons in this particular cowl is that 300 years after the death of the magi, their bodies were taken to Constantinople by Empress Helena, whose full name for you Roman scholars out there, Flavia, Julia, Helena, Augusta. She was around 250-330 AD. So we're talking about the late Roman Empire. Mother of Constantine the Great. Now these skulls were subsequently brought to Milan, a pony in an ox cart. It's always the details that fascinate me. How did they get that into the legend? It's wonderful, isn't it? By Eustodius, who was the city's bishop. So he wanted relics. So they went to Milan, where the emperor Constantine entrusted them to him. We're talking about 314 or so. This is what's referred to in the sources. Then subsequently these relics of the magi were taken by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa and given to the Archbishop of Cologne. Eight centuries later in 1164 in the 12th century. In the legend, three ships transported them out of reverence, one skull in each ship. So you thought the three ships come sailing was about Mary and the baby Jesus, but we have this legendary association that it's possibly associated with the magi, which I think is absolutely fascinating. And we're finding this out through a collected cowl on the Humber from a boatman that went to Beringold. Here he is. This is the sort of boats that this chap would have been sailing in. These are Humber cures of the early 1900s. There's a sort of coastal barges that can go up a river. He may be on one of these. Who knows? We don't know his name. And this, I'm sorry, it's rather small. This is the field notebook that Sabine Beringold recalls this cowl in. It's a really jolly tune and I want us to have a go. Do you fancy having a go at this? Okay. So the tune is this. I saw three ships come sailing in. I saw three ships come sailing in. But I saw three ships come sailing in. You're looking a bit glum. Fight glum. Right. Okay. Okay, sit up. This is what I tell my choir. I saw three ships come sailing in. Someone let the go. I saw three ships come sailing in. Next bit. I saw three ships come sailing. I saw three ships come sailing in. I saw three ships come sailing in. All traditions are live in the Antiquas. I love it, I love it. So let's look at the other verses. This is the first one, you've just sung. I asked them what they got aboard. They said they got three crons. I asked them where they was taken to. They said it was going to Cologne where the skulls ended up. I asked them where they came from, they said they came from Bethlehem. And this is the reliquary in Cologne where the bones of the major purport to be laid. It's one of the biggest ones in Europe, I understand. It may even be the biggest. There'll be scholars here who can tell you no doubt. So a wonderfully fascinating story between a coward we know and love, which is far more complicated than perhaps we have ever to imagined. Okay, let's look at Wraithful Williams. Here's a song for those who are musical amongst you. See if you can recognise that tune. This is the Ploughboys Dream and it was sung by Mr Garman. It was a labour of Forest Green, which is near Oakley in Surrey. He was about 60 years old when Wraithful Williams collected this from him. I'm a Ploughboys Stout and Strong as ever drove a team. It is indeed the tune. This is the tune. I am a Ploughboys Stout and Strong as ever drove a team. This is where the tune comes from. It's actually a collected folk song. The English hymno is full of them. Wraithful Williams commissioned to produce a new hymno with Percy Deyma 1907 and where would they go to find good tunes or they'll go to folk songs and that's what they did. So this tune was from the mouth of the people. This is where it came from. You'll see it's called Forest Green and that's what Wraithful Williams gave to the tune. It's the place it was collected from. I wish he'd put Mr Garman's name on it actually. That would have been much nicer for my mind but there we are. There are others. So what's that? Or he would finally be. When the folk world are captain, cry door hands. And that tune was attached to the words of John Bunyan. So you start digging around and you find some very interesting associations. So it's all very exciting for me. So that's the playboy's dream. There we are. So back to Cecil Sharp. Whilst Sharp was collecting these carols from people on various folk songs he became aware of a particular type of singing gathering and this is what he says in his introduction to English folk carols. In several parts of England I found carols which are peculiar to certain villages by the inhabitants of which they were guarded as private possessions of great value jealously guarded and retained for their own use. These are not traditional folk carols but the elementary compositions of simple musicians very possibly of those who in the old days were members of the church bands. Bounds like this where people in the choir would actually play and sing together. You'd have the musicians all meddled in, very hardy-esque. You all know under the Greenwood tree you've got the Melstock band, you know, rough music on a Saturday night and in church on a Sunday morning playing the tunes and the hymns etc. So these are the West Gallery choirs of the English rock tradition. Here's a lovely picture of the sort of thing that Sharp's referring to and another very famous image of the village choir by Thomas Webster. This is in the V&A. So Sharp says these are not traditional folk carols but the elementary compositions of simple musicians very possibly of those in the old days who were members of the church bands. They are easily distinguished from the popular carol by the formal nature of the music and words and also by the fact that many of them are written in parts. So as part of this caroling tradition amongst the people we have, if you like, the solo singers, the sort of songs I've been looking at here the two that people would join in with the choruses and then you get these composed works which are composed by local composers arranged in parts and this is what we like to turn today as West Gallery style music. So this group caroling tradition is very interesting. Sharp picks it up in the early 1900s and what we're talking about when we dig deeper is over two and a half centuries of the performance of distinctive carols in particular villages and they are guarded in those villages as their own distinctive carols. The one in me on X Ford, they have a set of carols there which are not allowed to go out of the village. We won't be tired anyone who takes the carols out of the village. This tradition is very prevalent in the west of England also particularly in South Yorkshire and Derbyshire and Sheffield. Has anyone been to any of the caroling up there? Fantastic. Would you like to describe it? Yes, yes. Thank you, thank you. It is a wonderful, wonderful tradition. It's all about group interaction. This is about part singing and there is also musical accompaniment. Sometimes it's quite complicated musical accompaniment but it's about people singing together so it's a slightly different tradition. This is also interesting. When we've moved out of the church in the chapel we're in the village pub. This is the focus and the centre of this seasonal celebration. It's performed with that musical direction because as you've just heard these are people who've sung these carols all their lives within their family and their community context and they're untrained singers. When they don't need music and words they do everything wrong. I thought you might like to hear an example of one from Exmoor. So this is the Dunster carol. This is actually sung in a formal concert but I love it because it gives you an impression of those four part harmonies that are so wonderful. I wish us luck with the link. It's a Westmount Gallery Music Association. A lot of this stuff is now being recreated and people are digging deep into the manuscripts of the local village communities of these carols and recreating them with old instruments like the serpents, the bass file etc. I myself actually once played an I am cello as part of this. That was terrifying. We got it from Stoke and Trent Museum. It's all pot riveted around the side. I was terrified to tune up to pitch kicks. They all pinged out. But it was absolutely great fun because a lot of these things are homemade. The carols are homemade and in the village if they haven't got a fiddle they get the carpenter or the coffee maker to knock up a fiddle. You can still find these in Parish churches around the countryside. They're fascinating. I'm sorry I can't do the dance to carol but do look it up on YouTube. You can find it yourself. This carol is in South Yorkshire. If you're interested Ian Russell has published a really interesting book on the Sheffield carols etc. A well worth reading. He's spent a long time studying these English folk carol genre. The one I'm going to share with you fingers crossed is at the Royal at Dunworth in West of Sheffield and I'm going to see if this one will work. Do you think? Interesting rules and regulations if you go to one of these sessions because if you were to introduce an example of carol that they don't normally sing they tell you in Yorkshire terms we don't sing that one here. So they are very particular traditions. Let's move on from the Yorkshire caroling tradition. I want to say a little bit about the sorts of songs that were being celebrated this time because not all of them were jolly and seasonal and wonderful. Some of those that are considered as carols by the people who sang them were, let's say, stern and even somewhat vengeful. The emphasis was on morality and mortality and I'm going to give you the words of one which actually beggars believe. This is from Joseph Hart's Harts Hymns from the 18th century. He was a carol felis minister in London and these are the carol words I will leave you to read these. It gets better. Oh well there's redemption at the end. The saviour was born. Hooray! After all that. So these are the sort of things that are in circulation and it's absolutely wonderful to find this sort of material. I'm going to take you to Somerset now. This is why I've done most of my research looking at Cecil Sharp singers and that's really the focus of what I'm interested in. I'm interested in the context of these carols who sang them, where they sang them, why they sang them, who was with them etc etc. So we're moving over there to meet one of Cecil Sharp singers. This is Harry Richards. This is one of Cecil Sharp's photographs. Cecil Sharp took a wonderful collection of photographs, a massive wonderful collection of his singers and all of his singers are represented in his collection. But what Sharp did and I think they're rather fine portraits is that he liked to give an impression in the portraits that he took of these singers of what they did and who they were. So here we have Harry Richards of the village of Curry Rival which is the town of Taunton and Langport who is a gardener. As you can see he's got his basket of potatoes, he's got his fork, he's just dug up his nice new potatoes there. Probably a local made basket. The basket industry is a big part of the Somerset sort of industries on the Somerset levels. I particularly like his beard. I think the facial hair in these photographs is fascinating. Bids are in again aren't they? So here's an interesting idea. What I also love about these photographs is that I think if you're a historian of costume these are fascinating because these are the clothes that do not survive in our museum collections, the good and the great, the courtly robes are there. Here we have the clothes of the poor which get made into walkhami downs, cleaning cloths, rag rugs etc. They disappear. Here we have a collection which is actually very interesting for the costume historian I think. Anyway, here's Harry Richards a great singer that Cecil Sharp met in Curry Rival that I want to share with you today is a wassail song. Now again, this is all part of that collection of Christmas cowling. Who in this room has done some wassailing? Excellent, whereabouts? Where were you? At the back. At the back. Fantastic. Fantastic here? At the globe. Over there there was some hands. Harry Richards, the fruit cider growing areas. There was some hands over here. What did you do on your wassail? I'm guessing it was an apple tree wassail. I'm guessing that you probably did things like beat up the trees, made a lot of noise, sang a song, libation of cider and the roots, all that sort of thing. Yes? Okay. This is very much part of traditions in the west country associated with Christmas singing. There are these sorts of wassails. There's the travelling wassail which you will know people go from house to house with a wassail bowl, perhaps farm to farm in the hope of getting some food, some money and sort of saying thank you very much to the farmer for their employment during the year and so on and so forth. And then there's the apple tree wassail. Now this particular song which has got a fantastic tune is from Cary Rhybour and it's one that was sung locally by the wassails. Here's the tune. You might find some nuances here that you recognise, some similarities with a well-known cowl. This is some wassail and wassail all over the town. The carpet is white and the ale it is brown. The carpet is made of the good old ashen tree and so is the... It feels quite ancient doesn't it when you sing it. It's a wonderful tune and this is part of a family of wassails in that area which have lovely verses like the goat dog of Langport he burnt his goat tail. You know, what is that about? We don't know. So again these songs, the tunes are wonderful. Sometimes the words get mashed up through that tradition of passing them on but even so they're still worth having. So this is Harry Richard's wassail. That wassail carried on to the 1950s. Dare I press that button on the top left hand corner and hope some sound comes out. So this is a recording from that period. Now I don't know if you can see at the top of that picture there's a chap learing at you from above with some lights around but he's in the wassail apple tree and this is what you did. You put children in the wassail in the tree with toast soaked in cider into the branches to appease the good spirits so the little robins and the things that were good for the tree that was a sort of offering if you will and around the roots you'd put cider you put children in the trees you shot guns into the trees not at the same time obviously. So again to drive away the bad spirits and all these and then you would walk around the trees singing a wassail song. So here's the coming rival wassailers in the 1950's. Let's keep our fingers crossed on this one. Let us all walk in and walk and fill our wassail bowl and sail away again to you, our wassail. I jolly come to our jolly wassail. Oh master our kisses have done you any harm pray hold fast this door and let us pass along and give us our deep thanks for singing of our song. To you our wassail I jolly come to our jolly wassail. So he said God bless the master and Mrs of this house and happy new year. So it's very much about going and appreciation for the labourers and the farming interactions being celebrated there. So this is what we did at Corry Rival which is interesting in the Willing IV pub which is where that was recorded and they still do wassail there is they have this thing called the Ashen faggat whereby they have faggats of wood and they bind them round with hazel and each time a binding pops then the master has to buy a round to everybody. So the more they get round it the better they are, the happier they will sail as be. So the burning of that is quite interesting some of that tradition and that still happens there. So that's the Corry Rival wassailers they are singing Harry Richard's song but what they've done, you'll hear the tune has changed from that very sort of modal sort of quite somber ancient sound so it's a bit jollier and a bit more majoring key and that's the old tradition and that's why I love it. It's a slippery beast, it moves around. Yes, yes it is. Wonderful. There's quite a lot of wassail vessels actually associated with wassail bowls and so on and we're going to see another one in a minute. Thank you. Right, I'm going to go to the full screen now for this. So we're looking at midwinter we're looking at fires in the orchards we're looking at solstice star sort of customs here we are libating the apple tree putting a nice lot of cider around it sticking the toast in the branches I've actually officiated at three of these now people keep asking me to the songs and so forth because they are becoming increasingly popular in rural areas and I know that they do one in Leeds now they do an urban wassail and it's a tradition that's starting to rise up again which is quite interesting now the song is associated with oh then you beat up the tree a lot as well to wake it up apparently that's what's going on there. The apple tree wassail song is different from the one it's very simple that I've just heard and it's the one in Somerset that's such a shark collected is old apple tree I would bear the Lord doth know where we shall be to be merry another year to blow while and to bear while and so merry let us be let every man drink up his cup and a health to the old apple tree to blow while and to bear while and so merry let us be let every man drink up his cup and a health to the old apple tree so they're lovely tunes there's also another tradition associated with wassailing which as we say in Gloucestershire wassailing in Gloucestershire so we talk about wassailing in Gloucestershire and here you have a set of wassailers with a very interesting character in the middle and that is the broad and the broad is a man dressed up as a cow and the broad could be taken around now the chuck on the right hand side you might just be able to work out it looks like a tree with lots of ribbons on it it's actually a wassail bowl and he's put some branches in it to decorate it so he's carrying round the wassail bowl they've got their cider these are your wassailers from temporary in the 1930s now they're singing very different sorts of songs up there and I love the Gloucestershire wassail because there's one particularly that celebrates the cows which is lovely a perfect song for you've got which one is it and here is to broad may and to her broad hall may God send our master a good cup of corn a good cup of corn that may we all see with a wassailing bowl we'll drink to the you know the chorus wassail, wassail all over the town our cup it is white and when it is burnt our bowl it is made of the white maple tree with a wassailing bowl we'll drink to the so again all sorts of dimensions to the Christmas wassail and I particularly love this photograph I hope they collected so many you can get merchandise it's so popular now you put wassailing on a google search you can buy your own wassailing shirt and all sorts of people are involved in it nowadays you never know who's going to get engaged at this wonderful activity however I just want to say a little bit I've given you a little sort of insight a little glimpse into the world of folk song and folk cowling it's a huge subject because it's very regional and very local villagers have their own particular cows I do urge you to go and do some of your own research on the most wonderful website that you need to visit and it's the English Folk Dance and Song Society's full English the full English it's a digital archive and what they've done is they digitise quite a lot of these collections of the people I showed you earlier on these collectors and they put them online they've scanned and digitised these images so if you you might put in a chipping sodbury or a village where you're from and you might find some singers that you didn't know existed and this material is all there for you when I was first researching this I had to trawl up to Cecil Sharp House and do that thing you do in an archive whereby the time is ticking on you're trying to get it all done and it's five to five and you still haven't got it all done the researchers know what I mean amongst us it's that horrible panic stations and now I can go in the luxury of my home and research it online and it's pure bliss so please do check out the English Folk Dance and have some fun now there's a little a couple of little tale pieces to this talk one of the lovely songs that Sharp collected was called The Months of the Year it's absolutely wonderful January is the first month the sun goes very low I went out in the farm yard the cattle fed on straw the weather being so cold the snow lies on the ground there will be an alteration before the year comes round before the year comes round at the back of the room is my daughter and that song was sung to Cecil Sharp by her great great great grandmother which was a pure pleasure to research that and find out that even within my own family and I don't have a Somerset bone in my body that that connection is there and I urge you to do the same because we all have singing ancestors and through the diligence and research of these wonderful collectors that I've been speaking about today we know who some of them are and you may well find that within your own family tree you have one of these singers that these collectors collected from a place you can go is I've published a series with a colleague of my doctor Chris Bierman of folk maps and as was mentioned at the beginning we've published folk maps for Gloucestershire Somerset and Hampshire and we've found out the names of these singers that were collected from in those counties and they're in those maps and there's a list of them and the villages they came from and the dates they were collected from you can get these online you can visit my website at stainless.com you can go on Bournemouth University website and find folk maps for Somerset, Hampshire and Gloucestershire so I do urge you to go and find out if you've got a singing ancestor there because we're all part of this heritage our ancestors sang that's what they did on a daily basis now I've shown you this last slide because the folk tradition never ends some years ago someone sang a wonderful song to me that is a midwinter song called The White Hair she learned that song from somebody else who learned it from somebody else who learned it from someone called Pip and that's all we know about this person so I feel like have received this through that process of all tradition I believe this song because whenever I sing it people want it, they take it on I do know it's been sung in West Africa would you believe already it's out there which shows that tradition is alive and kicking and I'm going to sing it to you as an example that the folk the folk tradition is still extant this celebrates if you will the midwinter solstice the notion of the birth of the song the reawaking of the earth so it's quite pagan in content but this is The White Hair do you see The White Hair standing still for a moment there are footprints there underneath the earth the lady is sleeping and the law is waiting do you see The White Hair standing still for a moment there are footprints there underneath the earth stirring and the law is making the table there are footprints there underneath the earth