Brigg Fair

click photo to enlarge
"It was on the fifth of August, the weather fine and fair,
Unto Brigg Fair I did repair, for love I was inclined..."
from the folk song, Brigg Fair (traditional)

One of my favourite pieces of music is Brigg Fair: An English Rhapsody by the English composer, Frederick Delius (1862-1934). It is an orchestral piece based on the Lincolnshire folk song that Percy Grainger heard (and recorded) from Joseph Taylor, a Lincolnshire singer. Grainger introduced the piece to Delius who turned it into a work that remains one of his best loved compositions.

As luck would have it we passed through Brigg yesterday, the fourth of August, and with the words of the song in mind we looked around for evidence of the fair. There was nothing that suggested it was on apart from a group of travellers with their horses and caravans. I took today's photograph of a man as he exercised his trotting horse on a street near a large car park. I guessed that this gathering might have had something to do with the fair, but since there was nothing else to indicate the it I resolved to find out more when we got home.

It seems that the fair is held on the first Saturday of August. That was the second of the month this year and so we had missed it. Apparently it is something of a social event and gathering of travellers for horse trading in much the same way that happens at Appleby in Westmorland. The fair has a long history - over 800 years - and today it is less formal and smaller than it would have been when Joseph Taylor was singing in the local musical festival. Next year, perhaps, we'll go on the right day.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 116mm (174mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f9
Shutter Speed: 1/200 sec
ISO:280
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Autumn and the Fall

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In the years 1916 to 1918 Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles spent forty six weeks recording folk songs sung by the inhabitants of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. They amassed a total of about five hundred songs (1,600 including variants), and nearly every one had its origin in the British Isles. This area of the United States was settled principally by people of English, Scots and Scots-Irish origin. When their ancestors emigrated to the New World they took very little by way of material possessions, but they did take their songs. In the Appalachians these had been passed down through the generations, the words embellished and embroidered, the melodies adapted by successive singers.

Cecil Sharp (1859-1924) had been collecting traditional folk songs and melodies since the early 1900s, and had, almost single-handedly, sparked a revival of English folklore. In his journeys through rural England he sought out the songs that the common people sang, and it is through his efforts, and those he inspired to search with him, that we have such a fine body of English folk songs today. Without Sharp's written and mechanical recording most of these songs would have died with their singers. It was this groundwork in England that enabled Sharp to identify what he heard in the Southern Appalachians. It also allowed him to work out that some of the versions he heard in the United States were closer to the original of the song than were the British versions. In the remote mountain area the songs had been subjected to fewer outside influences and frequently carried more of the melody and narrative that was sung by the earliest settlers.

In fact a number of words used in North America are old English words that the people of England no longer use, or are modifications. Take "the fall", meaning the season between summer and winter. In Britain the word "autumn" is almost universally used. Yet a few hundred years ago we too described this time of year as "the fall". I was thinking about this as I passed the Shell headquarters in London. On the pavement outside a demonstration by environmentalists was underway, and up above the last leaves were falling from trees growing in front of the building. The irregular branches and delicate yellow and orange leaves contrasted nicely with the very regular bands of windows and the deep blue sky. So, overcoming my natural desire to keep verticals vertical, I composed an image with two strong diagonals and pressed the shutter.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 27mm (54mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On