Vaughan Williams’s Journey into Folk: 14 April 1904

‘Twas down in a valley’, Samuel Childs, Willingale Doe, Essex

A young woman is kidnapped, her uncle is blamed for her disappearance. Just as he is going to the gallows for her murder, she reappears, having been rescued in far off lands by her lover.

This visit to the village of Willingale Doe was the beginning of a twelve-day trip to Essex that Vaughan Williams made just after he had finished the first draft of In the Fen Country. In his biography, Ursula Vaughan Williams records that he went to Brentwood ‘and bicycled round the neighbourhood collecting songs.’ The Heatley sisters of Ingrave vicarage, who had introduced Vaughan Williams to Charles Potiphar and other singers in the vicinity in December 1903, had undertaken detailed local research and were able to provide the composer with names of singers, lists of the songs they knew, and directions to where they lived. They had also written out the words for some of the songs. This preparation made it easy for Vaughan Williams to make contact with people who were good singers with interesting repertoires.

The song was collected at The Bell Inn, now a private house. Here Vaughan Williams met Mrs Charles White (sister of Mrs Horsnell who he had met in December 1903), and Mr Sam Childs (Vaughan Williams wrote Chiles) who sang this version of ‘Twas down in the valley’, a song more often known as ‘The Lost Lady Found’, a popular story of kidnapping and jeopardy which was collected throughout England.

Vaughan Williams collected three versions of the song from this area in Essex, all with different tunes. In Folk-songs from the Eastern Counties (1908) the composer chose for piano accompaniment the more ‘modal’ melody provided by Bloomfield (Vaughan Williams wrote Broomfield) in February 1904, in preference to the conventional major key of Childs’s version. In a modal scale the order of intervals between notes is different to a classical major or minor scale, and this creates a different sonic landscape or ‘feel’ – something we instinctively recognise when listening to different music genres such as Jazz, Blues, Raga, or Klezmer. The modal scales commonly found in English folk music – the Dorian and Aeolian – carry with them a melancholic, reflective mood. Although most songs heard by Edwardian collectors were in the major scale, they were drawn to the more exotic modal tunes and chose them more frequently for publication. In this case Vaughan Williams included all three Essex versions in the Journal of the Folk Song Society (1905) for scholarly comparison, but it was Bloomfield’s version he chose for a wider public.  

Vaughan Williams Memorial Library link: https://www.vwml.org/record/RVW2/2/30

Roud No. 901

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