Friday 30 December 2016

Three tunes

I recently purchased from BoundlessBookstore (Wallingford, Oxfordshire):
DAVIDSON'S | UNIVERSAL MELODIST, | CONSISTING OF | THE MUSIC AND WORDS | OF | POPULAR, STANDARD, AND ORIGINAL SONGS, &c. | ARRANGED SO AS TO BE EQUALLY ADAPTED FOR: | THE SIGHT-SINGER, | THE PERFORMANCE ON THE FLUTE, CORNOPEAN, ACCORDION, | VIOLIN, OR OTHER TREBLE INSTRUMENT. | VOL. II. | LONDON: | G. H. DAVIDSON, 19, PETER'S HILL, DOCTORS' COMMONS. | MDCCCLIV.
[16], 436 p.;
Bookseller's description: "General wear to boards with corners bumped. Hinges are a bit cracked with webbing visible. Content mainly clean with some foxing. Age toned pages throughout with some spotting to page ends."
<APKD; vol. 2 only, of perhaps 2 volumes published. The publishing history is complicated and unclear.>

Davidson's Universal Melodist is a later rival to The Universal Songster. But this time developments in printing music from moveable type mean that melody lines can be provided for all the songs included.


The three Bloomfield songs are in Volume II, as follows:

page 89: "The Fakenham Ghost" (music by W. A. Neild)
A setting of "The Fakenham ghost" by William Ashton Nield was published in 1834. This is presumably one of the "original songs" of the title page.

page 249, "Old Ringwood" (music by William Hawes)
I cannot trace any earlier publication, unless this is the setting previously attributed to Isaac Bloomfield.

page 401, "The Woodland Hallo" (music by G. Langham)
I cannot trace any earlier publication. There is an earlier setting (1807) by Nina d'Aubigny.


The Fakenham Ghost



Old Ringwood



The Woodland Hallo



I should acknowledge here that I would never have found these songs without the indexes created by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House (http://www.vwml.org/).

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