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Folk-song’s unsung heroine: Lucy Broadwood photographed in 1901
Surrey History Centre ref: 2185/LEB/9/111
Lucy Etheldred Broadwood, born on 9th August 1858 into the famous family of piano manufacturers, was a passionate collector of folk-songs and one of a group of Victorian songhunters who fuelled a revival of interest in England’s traditional music at the end of the nineteenth century.
As a child she had moved to the family home at Lyne on the Surrey-Sussex border, where she developed her love of country songs, feeling enormous empathy for these tunes which did not adhere to the conventional harmonies of the Victorian drawing-room. “The pure English folk-tune is exceedingly simple, usually only eight bars long,” she explained, “yet it has perhaps the most beautiful, original and varied cadences to be found in music.”
A gifted pianist and singer in her own right, she could have embarked on a professional career, but instead, as a spinster from a prosperous family, she was free to pursue both her classical musical interests and her passion for folk-songs. According to a friend, “single life, with the freedom to live as she pleased, suited her admirably.” She was known as a brilliant talker, full of both wit and humour, with a decidedly feminine penchant for rich deep colours and luxurious fabrics and a dread of modern science.
Her family background equipped her with the ideal skills needed to note down folk-songs and trace their origins. “It is not given to many to have the literary culture, the scholarly accuracy and the artistic imagination to see the folk song as a whole,” wrote fellow folk-song enthusiast and composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. She was following the example set by her uncle John Broadwood, who had been captivated by the carols sung by the ‘tipteers’ or mummers who came to Lyne at Christmas-time. His 1843 collection Old English Songs stood out for publishing the music exactly as he had heard it.
She and her peers believed that songs from the oral tradition needed to be written down in case they died out, and the emphasis fell on collecting ‘in the field’. Beginning close to home, she turned to “gardeners, artisans, game-keepers, shepherds, rustic labourers, gipsies, sailors, fishermen, workers at old-fashioned traces such as weaving or lace-making and the like, as well as domestic servants, especially nurses.”
Eventually she travelled as far as Devon, Ireland, Scotland and Lincolnshire, staying either with friends and family and listening to young and old wherever they would sing for her, whether on a windswept hillside or in a sweltering orchid-house. “A Surrey hedger, looking like a Viking, has sung across a hedge at me, emphasising the tragic points of his ballad with vicious snaps of his shears,” she recalled.
In 1893, in partnership with the music critic and writer J A Fuller Maitland, she published the influential English County Songs. With her sensitive piano accompaniments, the songs were suddenly accessible to the amateur pianists of the drawing-room. This was followed in 1908 with a second volume English Traditional Songs and Carols, mostly the result of her own fieldwork.
However Lucy’s most important legacy to the folk-song movement was in her contribution to the newly formed Folk Song Society, founded in 1898. She took up editorship of the society’s Journal in 1904, which consequently developed a reputation for accuracy and scholarship. From then on until her death in 1929 she dropped her fieldwork to concentrate on editing other collectors’ submissions to the Journal.
She proved to be the ideal person to bridge the gap between the worlds of ‘art’ music and folk-song, and Lucy herself led a life that bridged these two worlds, easily moving between town and country, from the sophisticated concerts and recitals that she would host in London to the fields and farm buildings that cradled her treasured folk music.
As a child she had moved to the family home at Lyne on the Surrey-Sussex border, where she developed her love of country songs, feeling enormous empathy for these tunes which did not adhere to the conventional harmonies of the Victorian drawing-room. “The pure English folk-tune is exceedingly simple, usually only eight bars long,” she explained, “yet it has perhaps the most beautiful, original and varied cadences to be found in music.”
A gifted pianist and singer in her own right, she could have embarked on a professional career, but instead, as a spinster from a prosperous family, she was free to pursue both her classical musical interests and her passion for folk-songs. According to a friend, “single life, with the freedom to live as she pleased, suited her admirably.” She was known as a brilliant talker, full of both wit and humour, with a decidedly feminine penchant for rich deep colours and luxurious fabrics and a dread of modern science.
Her family background equipped her with the ideal skills needed to note down folk-songs and trace their origins. “It is not given to many to have the literary culture, the scholarly accuracy and the artistic imagination to see the folk song as a whole,” wrote fellow folk-song enthusiast and composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. She was following the example set by her uncle John Broadwood, who had been captivated by the carols sung by the ‘tipteers’ or mummers who came to Lyne at Christmas-time. His 1843 collection Old English Songs stood out for publishing the music exactly as he had heard it.
She and her peers believed that songs from the oral tradition needed to be written down in case they died out, and the emphasis fell on collecting ‘in the field’. Beginning close to home, she turned to “gardeners, artisans, game-keepers, shepherds, rustic labourers, gipsies, sailors, fishermen, workers at old-fashioned traces such as weaving or lace-making and the like, as well as domestic servants, especially nurses.”
Eventually she travelled as far as Devon, Ireland, Scotland and Lincolnshire, staying either with friends and family and listening to young and old wherever they would sing for her, whether on a windswept hillside or in a sweltering orchid-house. “A Surrey hedger, looking like a Viking, has sung across a hedge at me, emphasising the tragic points of his ballad with vicious snaps of his shears,” she recalled.
In 1893, in partnership with the music critic and writer J A Fuller Maitland, she published the influential English County Songs. With her sensitive piano accompaniments, the songs were suddenly accessible to the amateur pianists of the drawing-room. This was followed in 1908 with a second volume English Traditional Songs and Carols, mostly the result of her own fieldwork.
However Lucy’s most important legacy to the folk-song movement was in her contribution to the newly formed Folk Song Society, founded in 1898. She took up editorship of the society’s Journal in 1904, which consequently developed a reputation for accuracy and scholarship. From then on until her death in 1929 she dropped her fieldwork to concentrate on editing other collectors’ submissions to the Journal.
She proved to be the ideal person to bridge the gap between the worlds of ‘art’ music and folk-song, and Lucy herself led a life that bridged these two worlds, easily moving between town and country, from the sophisticated concerts and recitals that she would host in London to the fields and farm buildings that cradled her treasured folk music.
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