The Trees They Do Grow High

Last Friday evening I trudged through the drizzle to an event in a neighbouring village. It was arranged by "Waterlight", a project which is documenting our little chalk stream, the River Mel, through film, photography, poetry and prose - and, last Friday, in music too. I'm going to tell you a little of what I learned there (full links and references at the end), and some things I've found out since, all illustrated with some of my own (suitably enhanced) photos.

The house pictured above is on one of my regular walks; I've passed by for years without photographing it or knowing anything about it. But now I know that in the summers of 1906, 1907 and 1908 the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and his wife took their holidays here. 

While he was here he cycled or took the train to the surrounding villages, where he collected folk songs from farm workers as they gathered in the pubs in the evenings. At that time there was a small but dedicated band of folk song enthusiasts who were determined to keep these old rural traditions alive despite the increasing urbanisation of the country.

As far as is known he only ever collected one song in my home village and that was a song which turns up all over the place, always with very similar words but with slightly different tunes. The title is (usually) "The Trees They Do Grow High" and there are many modern recordings of the song, most famously by Joan Baez and the British folk group Pentangle. The song is said to be based on a true story of a arranged child marriage which took place in the seventeenth century. 

The singer from Meldreth was a man called Ginger Clayton. Vaughan Williams had previously heard the song sung by a Mr Penfold in Sussex in 1904 and had even gone back in 1907 and made a wax cylinder recording of it. In the same year he also ventured to Herefordshire where he heard another variant of the song.

Vaughan Williams was of course mainly interested in the music rather than the words of a song as he attempted to absorb and incorporate elements of the tunes he collected into his own, very English, compositions. You can, should you so desire, view the original manuscripts of his attempts to note down these songs, as they are available online. It may be a mark of his esteem for "The Trees They Do Go High" that he noted down both music and words for this song.

I regret that I don't read music - I have enough trouble with Vaughan Williams's scribbled hand-writing - but I can see enough to realise that his informant must have been an interesting, if undisciplined, singer; the time signature changes between 2/4, 6/8 and 3/4, and he's jotted down the tune for two verses, so presumably the tune had some variations too.

At the end of one of his manuscripts of Ginger Clayton's song a note has been added which looks as though it says "The note values are approximate - the song was sung very freely". And intriguingly it also says "This version has been collected from a phonography record"; so does this mean that there was once a wax cylinder of our local singer?

We don't know what, if anything, Vaughan Williams intended to do with the song, though because he collected several versions and seems interested in the lyric of the song he may well have intended to arrange the song with piano accompaniment. The tune does crop up in the 3rd movement  of his ‘English Folk Songs: suite for military band’, 1923. 

The event I attended last Friday included "our" song and others which Vaughan Williams collected on his sojourn in Cambridgeshire, performed brilliantly by Penni Mclaren Walker and Bryan Causton. If you want to hear a version of the song you can click on any of these below:

Joan Baez sings "The Trees They Do Grow High" from her LP "Joan Baez - Vol 2"

or Pentangle's version from their "Sweet Child" album
for my money the best version is by Martin Carthy on his influential debut recording.

or here's Benjamin Britten's arrangement of the song

if you're really keen you can listen to the wax cylinder version recorded by Vaughan Williams in Sussex in 1907. The singer is Mr Penfold, landlord of the village pub.

My sources:

Waterlight - the project to document the River Mel. Especially the blogpost "Vaughan Williams in Meldreth".

They in turn drew heavily on Mary Humphreys' book "Folk Songs Collected In Cambridgeshire" . 

And she must have consulted, among other things, The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library online site.

Take care.