SONGS FROM ROBIN HOOD'S BAY
By Jim Foster
A set of songs from Robin Hood’s Bay in 1877 has finally been published - 144 years after it was collected! Penned by 17-year-old Margaret Moorsom, who lived with her family in Lancelot Cottage on Plane Tree Street, Songs from Robin Hood’s Bay is a handwritten collection of songs from a time when the village was full of sailors, shipowners and sea captains. It was written some years before the first British Folk Revival, and pre-dates the collections of celebrated folk song collectors such as Francis James Child, whose Child Ballads were published from 1882 to 1898, Sabine Baring-Gould (1889), Frank Kidson (1891), not to mention Percy Grainger and Cecil Sharp who only began collecting folk songs in the early 1900s.
Tantalising Find
Martin Carthy, in his foreword, calls the book “a truly tantalising find” and compares it to “the mighty Sussex Copper Family songbook”. The songs are a fascinating selection of those popularly sung locally at the time. Some are humorous, some sad, some common, some rare. Some are peculiarly local, including the nationally known Stow Brow (Roud #185) and some are early variations of well-known ballads. Only one, Lord Ullin’s Daughter, first published in 1809, has an attributable writer. Many are romantic songs involving sailors and young ladies - were they the “chick-lit” of the times? Certainly, you can see their attraction for a 17-year-old girl in 1877.
History in Song
But the book has an appeal far beyond the academic. Reproduced as it was written, miss-spellings and all, it represents a time capsule of stories and subjects that the inhabitants of this little coastal village sang about all those years ago - in the days before the railway arrived bringing visitors from far and near. Who was the Lady of Robin Hood’s Bay who “Yorkshired” her lover, bravely? And how come the Butcher and the Tailor found themselves transported to Sunderland after a night’s carousing on board a ship in the Bay? Was the Liverpool Landlady the beginnings of the commonly popular Wild Rover, and was the Nabob of Calcutta really enraptured by tales of The Famed City of Robin Hood’s Bay? That’s just some of the stories in song to be found in this slim volume, which is as much a history book as a song book, and will delight those with an interest in the history of this corner of the North East as well as lovers of the traditional music and song of our land
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