Vaughan Williams’s Journey into Folk: 23 [?] May 1904
‘The Birds in the Spring’, Isaac Longhurst, Forest Green, Surrey
The singer sits by a grove and listens to the nightingale sing. They encourage everyone to listen to the sound, with which no music or singer could compare.
Forest Green is close to Leith Hill Place, Surrey, now owned by the National Trust, which was the childhood home of Vaughan Williams: he and Adeline (his first wife) often visited his mother, sister and aunt who continued to live there. On this trip home in May, Vaughan Williams collected songs from estate staff – the wife of the tenant farmer, and the gamekeeper – and in the neighbouring hamlet he re-visited Isaac Longhurst, who he had first heard during the previous Christmas holidays [27 December 1903].
Vaughan Williams noted that the song was collected in ‘May 1904’ with no specific date, but Ursula Vaughan Williams (the composer’s second wife and his biographer) noted that on the 24th he cycled from Leith Hill Place over to Monk’s Gate to visit Mrs Verrall from whom he noted down eight songs. Longhurst’s songs immediately precede Verrall’s in the composer’s notebook, so it’s likely they were collected on the previous day.
This song is about the nightingale – the singer sets out one May morning, as so many singers seem to do, and they hear the sweet song of the bird; unlike most other songs that start off as an innocent walk in the countryside, this doesn’t develop into a song about meeting a pretty maid or ploughboy but continues in two further verses to praise the singing of the birds. It’s not the first song in this collection that includes the nightingale [15 April 1904]: the Edwardian woods and thickets of southern England were filled with their song. Perhaps Longhurst had been listening to them singing in the Leith Hill lanes only that morning.
I checked from other sources that Vaughan Williams intended the phrase ‘I never heard so sweet’ to be repeated three times: he only wrote this line once, followed by a few random dashes – clear to him, but potentially ambiguous for people like me, reading the manuscript more than a century later. He did mark in the pauses that follow each of these phrases. I can imagine Longhurst’s audience, in the pub, at home, or perhaps in a break from labouring, joining in with this refrain as they often would when lines were repeated.
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library link: https://www.vwml.org/record/RVW2/2/93
Roud No.356
Next post: 24 May
