This month's Cultural Heritage event at the University of Cumbria was about folk music, song and dance. Dr Sue Allan spoke about the importance of Cumbrian songs being far "more than just D'ye Ken John Peel...." She referenced hunting songs, dialect songs, broadside ballads, border ballads and lots of other popular songs. The list really made me think of the local culture and the importance of music in the county going back centuries.
I realise that I know very little about folk music and dancing, and that all I do know I learned from Elsie J Oxenham's Abbey books! She was a huge fan of the folk movement and many of the folk collectors that Sue Allan mentioned today, were friends of Oxenham's. Anne Geddes Gilchrist was a contemporary of Oxenham, she was a collector of folk songs, especially Cumbria songs, and many were published in the Journal of the Folk Song Society (1915).
Ralph Vaughan Williams also collected folk songs and alongside his more mainstream composing, he was one of the musicians who participated in the first English Folk Song revival. He collected folk songs in Cumberland, most notably those by the dialect poet Robert Anderson.
I learned so much about folk music, folk dancing, morris dancing and sword dancing. I had never realised just how much there was of all these in Cumbria during the late 19th century and early 20th century.
