Joseph, a rather grumpy old man, and his wife, Mary, are walking in the garden when they see a cherry tree. When she asks her husband to pick some of the cherries he refuses, but the cherry tree bows down so that she can pick them herself. An angel appears to Joseph and tells him that the heavenly king will be born in an ox-stall that night. When the baby is born Mary places him in a manger and hears the angels sing.
This post takes a break from Vaughan Williams’s song collecting journeys in 1904, to celebrate a Christmas carol that he identified as his first introduction to folk song. Writing in 1950, he recalled that he was about ten (1882) when he heard ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’ and that his reaction ‘was more than simple admiration for a fine tune’ - there was a sense of recognition: ‘Here’s something which I have known all my life – only I didn’t know it!’
He heard the song at his ‘aunt’s’ house where the Vaughan Williams family (his mother, Margaret, and his siblings, Hervey and Meggie) would stay at Christmas time. Emily Massingberd, who was actually a cousin of Vaughan Williams’s mother, was ‘much bitten by the William Morris movement’ and loved Christmas Carols.
There were four Massingberd children, and the two families would gather round the piano to sing carols from Stainer and Bramley’s Christmas Carols New and Old. The book was beautifully produced with engravings by contemporary artists that present a Victorian Christmas world of starlit nights, snow blanketed hills, and wassailing choirs of quaintly dressed children. The stated aim of the editors was to ‘obtain traditional Carol tunes and words which have escaped the researches of previous collectors’. It contained fourteen tunes listed as ‘traditional’ including ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’. Published first in the 1860s, the publication’s concern to preserve old tunes fitted into a growing movement to conserve landscape and rural culture that was seen to be under threat from industrialisation, culminating in the establishment of numerous conservation organisations such as the Commons, Open Spaces & Footpaths Preservation Society [1865]; National Trust [1895]; Gypsy Law Society [1889]; Royal Society for the Protection of Birds [1889] and the Folk-Song Society [1898].
It's not immediately clear what aspect of ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’ caught Vaughan Williams’s young imagination - but although the arrangement is in G major there is an emphasis throughout the piece on the note D, akin to the continuous drone of a hurdy gurdy. This gives the song a slight Mixolydian flavour [see 14 April 1904 on modes] that was possibly unfamiliar enough to arouse his interest. He wrote that the tune remained ‘a fragrant possession’ all his life.
There is an undated note of this tune in Vaughan Williams’s scrapbook, along with other songs collected by Ella Leather in Herefordshire. Between 1907 and the First World War, she and Vaughan Williams often worked together - she had good contacts with the Traveller and Romany communities who picked the hops in Herefordshire, and she could collect the words of their songs easily, but she wasn’t able to note down music by ear. Instead, she recorded singers on a phonograph, and Vaughan Williams would transcribe them – as he seems to have done in this case (he would also accompany her on the trips sometimes). He noted the song again from a Mr Davies in Stourport, Herefordshire in 1913 - but the melody was different.
I haven’t sung this song but have uploaded the piano arrangement as the young Vaughan Williams found it in Stainer & Bramley.
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library link: https://www.vwml.org/record/RVW1/2/78
Roud No. 453
Next post: 26 December
MERRY CHRISTMAS!