Vaughan Williams’s Journey into Folk: 26 December 1904
‘Adieu to Lovely Nancy’, Mr Cooper, Plaistow, Sussex
A sailor, about to go to sea, asks to exchange rings with his sweetheart, Nancy. He promises to write to her from ‘every foreign land’. He moves on to describe the plight of ‘Jack Tars’, who expect to be ‘cast away’ at any moment during storms, but he ends on an optimistic note with a toast to wives and sweethearts.
After a short break for Christmas, Vaughan Williams was out again on Boxing Day, visiting the Sun Inn at ‘Plaistow (Sussex near Dunsfold)’ where he heard Mr Cooper sing one song. There are Sun Inns at both Plaistow and Dunsfold which confuses things - but according to the 1901 census there were several Cooper households living in Plaistow parish, so it was probably here, in the pub now known as ‘Ye Olde Sun Inn’ where he heard ‘Adieu to Lovely Nancy’.
This song was featured in the first edition of the Journal of the Folk Song Society (1898) after it had been sung to Kate Lee, the Society’s Honorary Secretary, by two men from the Copper (not Cooper) family at Rottingdean near Brighton, about forty miles south of Plaistow. Although Lee had spent three evenings with the brothers noting down their songs, she got the name of one of them wrong and mixed up their jobs. Inaccuracies like these are distressingly frequent in collectors’ notes. Sometimes this was due to mishearing regional accents, but it’s also the result of a focus on the material as the prize to be recorded, rather than the singers and their performances – hence the sparsity of information on people like Mr Cooper at Plaistow.
The Copper brothers that Lee met were Thomas, pub landlord, and James, a farm manager, who were song collectors in their own right - the Copper family of Rottingdean are renowned for continuing the living music tradition to the present day [http://www.thecopperfamily.com/]. Lee noted that they sang in harmony – and the family still do – but this was not common across the country. When Vaughan Williams was in the Sun Inn on this day, or at the Wheatsheaf, Kingsfold before Christmas, the people assembled might have joined in with choruses and refrains, but they would have usually sung in unison.
It’s striking how many times sailors, and the life at sea, feature in this random selection of songs collected by Vaughan Williams – a reflection, perhaps, of England’s long-standing idea of itself as a seafaring nation. The tune Cooper sang for ‘Adieu to Lovely Nancy’ is different to the better known Copper family version (see https://mainlynorfolk.info/copperfamily/songs/adieusweetlovelynancy.html), and the words are awkward in places – the first line ‘ten thousand times a day’ is usually ‘ten thousand times, adieu’ to rhyme with ‘new’ in the next line; similarly, in the third line the ring is usually exchanged ‘with me’ to rhyme with ‘the sea’ – but here it is written ‘my own’ with one of Vaughan Williams’s question marks. I have sung the lyrics as Vaughan Williams wrote them.
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library link: http://www.vwml.org/record/RVW2/3/36
Roud No.165
Next post: 31 December
