Country Gardens: A Song History

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The Traditional Tune Archive traces this air back to 1728, when it was heard in the stage production The Quaker's Opera, and notes that it went on to appear in other eighteenth-century ballad operas and in Daniel Wright's flute tutor of about 1735.[1] The printed edition, credited to Thomas Walker, says the work was staged in Lee's and Harper's theatrical booth at Bartholomew Fair, and it gives the melody of each song.[2] A Gloucestershire tune book of 1736, dedicated to John Thurston of Kington near Thornbury, has a "Country Garden" whose first two bars differ from the version in The Quaker's Opera.[3] By the early 1780s, song collections were setting the words of "The Vicar of Bray" to the same melody.[1]

Photograph of a small concertina with wooden ends and green bellows, beside its wooden carrying case

Charles Wheatstone, Concertina, mahogany (?), leather, paper, metal (brass, nickel-silver), 1855–60. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the tune.

Morris dance musicians kept the tune in use into the twentieth century.[1] One of them was William Kimber (1872-1961), a Headington Quarry morris dancer and concertina player, whom Cecil Sharp first heard on Boxing Day 1899, a meeting credited with leading to the revival of English morris dancing.[4] Sharp's manuscript shows that he wrote down "Country Gardens" from Kimber's playing on 25 May 1906, at the Espérance Club in London.[5] Sharp also used the title "Country Gardens" for a tune he noted in 1907 from the Lower Swell fiddler William Hathaway, whom he visited in Cheltenham.[6]

Percy Grainger based his piano setting on the tune Sharp had collected, and he wrote it in 1918 as a birthday present for his mother.[7] It was published in 1919 by G. Schirmer in New York and Schott in London, as number 22 in his series of British folk-music settings.[8] In 1919 Grainger also recorded it on a piano roll for the Aeolian Company, and it became his most successful piece.[7] He grew to detest it, yet it remained a major source of his income until his death, and for a time he shared the royalties with Sharp.[7] Judy House and Kirk House include a four-part arrangement in The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts, Book 2, a set of ensemble arrangements.[9]

Our book that contains the song "Country Gardens"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Country Garden".
  2. IMSLP: "The Quaker's Opera (Walker, Thomas)".
  3. GlosTrad: "Country Garden, tune from Thurston ms".
  4. Oxford History: "Oxford Inscriptions: Cecil Sharp & William Kimber".
  5. Vaughan Williams Memorial Library: "Country Gardens (Cecil Sharp MSS, CJS2/10/946)".
  6. GlosTrad: "Country Gardens (Tune from William Hathaway)".
  7. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, australianscreen: "Country Gardens (1919): Notes".
  8. IMSLP: "Country Gardens (Grainger, Percy)".
  9. Judy House And Kirk House: "The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts, Book 2".
  10. Image: Charles Wheatstone, Concertina, mahogany (?), leather, paper, metal (brass, nickel-silver), 1855–60. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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