English Village Carols

Abstract

Christmas caroling tradition of South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire has helped to qualify previous characterizations of English folksong style as exclusively solo, a cappella and monodic (1970, 1973). Now the former editor of The Folk Music Journal has brought the tradition to life in a series of cassette recordings with accompanying booklets issued by his own label, Village Carols (Bridge House, Unstone, Sheffield, SI8 5AF, England). The series includes five cassettes, each of which, together with an accompanying booklet, documents the history, content, and style of carol singing at a single performance venue and places it within the broader context of the regional tradition of seasonal music. As a result, the listener may glean from the collection as a whole an impression of the comparative stability and diversity of the tradition. Vernacular performance of Christmas carols in the region immediately to the north and west of the British industrial city of Sheffield takes two principal forms. As the focus of a house visitation custom involving schoolchildren and adolescents, a repertoire of Christmas songs derived largely from popular music accompanies a widespread form of ritual begging. This type of singing seems to have emerged throughout the urban North of England during the Industrial Revolution in a development described by The New Oxford Conmpanion to Music in quite unsympathetic terms: