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bequeathed to Vaughan Williams who eventually donated them to the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s library, now known as the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, and they can be read online as part of the library’s digital archive scheme, The Full English.
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Butterworth also submitted a selection of his collected songs to the Folk Song Society, and 28 songs, with 40 tunes, were published in the 1913 issue of its journal. The journal had a limited circulation, and many of the collectors also compiled books of songs for a wider audience. These usually included piano accompaniment – this was, of course, before radio and in the early days of recorded sound, and printed music was an important industry. Butterworth brought his wider musical skills to the task of accompaniment, and his arrange- ments of the songs, first published in 1913 as Folk Songs From Sussex have been recorded commercially in more recent years.
Although he was able to hear a wide range of music as a critic – invaluable experience for a budding composer – Butterworth left The Times after a year and became a music teacher at Radley College in Oxfordshire. Here he continued to collect songs, as well as com- pose music. He was a restless character, unable to settle, and after a year left Radley to enrol at the Royal College of Music, but he was a frequent truant.
It was at about this time, about 1910 or 1911, when George But- terworth took up morris dancing. Where he learned and who taught him is not clear although it is possible that Reginald Tiddy was one of his teachers. Sharp was determined to have a men’s morris side to illustrate his lectures and the team made its debut in February 1912, just a couple of months after the founding of the English Folk Dance Society. In April that year, Butterworth went morris dance hunting in the Bicester area of Oxfordshire, finding long-retired dancers from the village of Bucknell. His notes from the trip are not encouraging: “Some of the steps are quite clear, others unintelligible, and the joins are bad.” Nevertheless, a further visit by Sharp led to the publi- cation of several dances from the village.
That same year, the men’s morris side danced at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, the home of William Morris’s widow, and probably on that occasion, Butterworth’s dancing was filmed. Butterworth can be seen dancing two jigs: Molly Oxford from Fieldtown and I’ll Go And List For A Sailor from Sherborne, as well as a country dance with Maud and Helen Karpeles and Cecil Sharp himself. Known as the Kinora films from the technique used, they can be found on YouTube.
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utterworth continued his morris dance collecting in Badby, Northamptonshire, in 1913, and his collected dances were included in part five of The Morris Book, which was jointly authored by Sharp and Butterworth. Badby was the only morris dance tradition published by Sharp that he had not personally collected. Butterworth also accom- panied Sharp to collect rapper sword dances in north-east England, and by all accounts was a first-rate rapper dancer.
Further collaboration with Sharp came with the interpretations of country dances from the Playford collections, with Butterworth’s name appearing alongside Sharp’s on the title page of volumes three and four of The Country Dance Books. By the time of the final volume, 1922, Butterworth was dead, but Sharp paid tribute to his contribution in the introduction, remarking on his “keen and unusu- ally ingenious mind” that he brought to bear on the interpretations.
So involved in folk and morris dancing was Butterworth that his response to someone who described him as a musician was, “I’m not a musician, I’m a professional dancer”.
It is for his compositions that Butterworth is more widely known today among a wider audience. The death of Butterworth’s mother in January 1911 appears to have prompted him to work more consci- entiously on his compositions. In the words of his most recent biog- rapher, Anthony Murphy, “It seems that following the death of his mother a dam had burst and Butterworth was impelled to make sense of his life as a composer.”
Two English Idylls were first performed in Oxford Town Hall in February 1912. Number one contains three folk tunes: Dabbling In The Dew, Just As The Tide Was Flowing and Henry Martin, while number two was based on a single tune, Phoebe And Her Dark-Eyed Sailor. The Times reviewer wrote of the music’s “great individuality of harmony and orchestration”.
olk song collectors preserved their original fieldnotes, perhaps in a tidied-up version, when they returned home. In Butterworth’s case, at some later date, he copied up all the tune versions of particular songs onto the same page to aid comparison. These handwritten notes were
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