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y 1886 he’d become a journalist – the way he’d describe himself for the rest of his life – writing a col- umn called ‘Notes On Old Tunes’ for the Leeds Mercury Supplement. His introduction to one of them could almost stand as his manifesto: “To the antiquary they are of great use, for he knows that more side-lights are thrown upon the state of society by its songs and melodies than anything else; and whatever people may now think of the old tunes, it must be remembered that they have stood as great a test as pos- sible in their popularity, living through all changes of society and through all classes of men.”
B Above all, Kidson loved a good tune, a simple, memorable
melody, one reason he always refused to denigrate the music hall songs. They had great tunes.
“His agenda was his interest in the basic tune behind a song,” says Pete Coe, who, with Alice Jones, assembled and toured the show The Search For Five Finger Frank.
The source was always important to Kidson. He corresponded with others who knew songs, even people in in his home town. He struck up written friendships with others around the country who were collecting songs. They exchanged information, and Kidson was generous with details from his ever-increasing collection of old (often rare) books and manuscripts.
In 1890 he published Old English Country Dances in an edition of 80 copies. It featured many little-known pieces, and has received scant acknowledgement over the years. But he was already preparing the work for which he’s still remembered.
Before that could happen, though, his mother died. Kidson, unmarried – he would never wed – lived with her and relied on her in many ways. As his niece Ethel recalled: “She died aged 79 and uncle was left alone in his grief. His mother had ever been his close companion, so the tie was closer than that of… mother and son.”
Quite simply, he needed someone there. Arrangements were made to make sure he wasn’t alone. As Ethel, whose real name was Emma, wrote in her biography of Kidson: “Uncle then pro- posed to my mother (who was a widow with four children) that he should adopt me. This was agreed and at 16 years of age I came to live [at Kidson’s house] on Burley Road [in Leeds].
Kidson had a companion and Ethel had a replacement for her
father, Kidson’s late brother. At that point, Frank was preparing for the publication of Traditional Tunes, and Ethel was soon immersed in it: “I, having a quick ear, was soon singing them all over.”
The book appeared in a subscription issue of 200 copies and was a groundbreaking work: words and the unadorned tune, with notes about each piece. The “collection of ballad airs,” as he called it, was “chiefly obtained in Yorkshire and the south of Scotland… from broadsides and from oral traditions.”
Kidson hadn’t gone out and collected every song himself. He quite plainly proclaimed that hadn’t been the case, and men- tioned people like Benjamin Holgate and Charles Lolley, who both gave him material they’d heard or collected themselves. Most of the tunes had never been printed before, which truly set the vol- ume apart.
Interestingly, his two books, along with his Leeds Mercury columns and eight more articles for The Musical Times largely con- stituted everything he put in print about folk song, along with 27 more songs in the Journal Of The Folk Song Society in the early 1900s. It wasn’t a great deal, but it was enough to secure him a reputation.
In later years, two criticisms were levelled at Kidson: the fact
that he hadn’t done his own song hunting, and that he didn’t col- lect industrial songs. “He was subject to the time,” Coe observes. “The 19th century was Romanticism and what was disappearing.”
In the pioneering days, no rules existed; people came to songs and tunes in any way they could. Finding the piece was what mat- tered to Kidson, and then tracking it back through history using the resources of his library.
He collected more than 30 of the 83 pieces in Traditional Tunes himself, virtually all in North Yorkshire or Scotland. His very modest upbringing meant he was comfortable with Yorkshire dialects, and not afraid to use them. He never looked down on the people who sang; he treated them, men and women, respectfully, and as he told the Sheffield Daily Telegraph in 1906, “A remark to the effect that ‘there’s nowt like t’owd songs’ will certainly produce an affir- mative, and if the hearer has time and inclination to listen, a crop of interesting bygone ditties formerly current in the district.”
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