53 f
to them of tunes old and new,” always giving them “a good din- ner.” Ethel, with her keen ear and excellent memory, was the one who had to remember the tune until she and her uncle could reach a piano and pick out the melody and note it down.
T
Traditional Tunes made him into a leading figure among the few people interested in folk song. When Lucy Broadwood came to visit him in Leeds she was amazed by Kidson’s library, “housed in a small and rather commonplace house in Leeds” with “a mass of 17th- and 18th-century publications, it is especially representa- tive in Scottish, Welsh and early Irish collections; also in country- dance books and ballad operas. There is also a considerable num- ber of song-books (words only) and of 18th-century tune-books of sacred music.”
It was during this period that Kidson’s ability to ferret out the history of a tune helped give him his nickname. As Ethel noted in her biography: “Dr. Wise of Manchester christened him the musi- cal Sherlock Holmes, and many of his letters to Uncle began ‘My Dear Holmes.’”
In 1898, Kidson was elected to the Executive Committee of the brand-new Folk Song Society, and Ethel noted: “Uncle went up to London to attend a meeting of the Folk Song Society and was one of the foundation members. Mrs. Kate Lee began the society.”
By then, though, he was already easing away from song col- lecting to focus on his epic work about British music publishers. He gathered very few songs after this, largely when asked to judge singing competitions, as in Kendal in 1902 and Lincolnshire in 1908, where he gave the singing prize to one Joseph Taylor. From that point he seemed to rarely leave Leeds, although he received many visitors. Once Cecil Sharp began his ascendancy, Kidson and the other pioneers were sidelined, and in many ways history was rewritten. As Ethel somewhat tactfully put it, Sharp was “a man of most tenacious purpose and he set out to make Folk Song known the world over, and he largely succeeded though he was not the one to acknowledge the work of others in the field.”
Kidson and Sharp disagreed on several points. Kidson didn’t advocate teaching folk songs in schools, feeling the subject matter was not something for children. Nor was he a fan of harmonising the songs (although a collaboration later in life saw him doing both things).
Kidson died in 1926. Three years before, though, he received an honorary MA degree from Leeds University. “We had many jokes about the letters MA. Uncle said it stood for ‘Musical Ass’ because he was a poor musician; in regard to his piano playing he called himself ‘Five Finger Frank’.”
Emily, herself a published writer, kept his flame alive, putting out more songbooks which paid meagre royalties, and offered his huge collection of books to Leeds Libraries for £1,000 – a bargain they turned down. In the end much went to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow for £500. And so Frank was somewhat forgotten for decades. His house finally received a blue plaque in 2003 (unveiled by Vic Gammon).
But there were flickers of interest. Early in their career, the
Watersons revived some of the Kidson material. “We were looking for our music,” says Norma Waterson. “We looked for people who’d collected songs in Yorkshire, and that’s why we became interested. The majority of the songs hadn’t been sung in years. The thing about songs in books is they’re shorthand, you have to look at how they’d been passed down.”
And finally, Kidson has received his due as one of the great pioneers of folk song collecting. “To start with, he did it. He was the first to publish his collection,” Coe notes. “And he understood that the printed versions, the broadsides, were important. He was a sort of historian. He was interested in that old stuff.”
With thanks to Karen Downham for letting me examine the Kidson collection at Leeds Central Library, and John Valdis Franma- nis’s PhD thesis, a vital source.
fivefingerfrank.co.uk/about-frank-kidson vwml.org/archives-catalogue/FK
F
he pair also obtained pieces from street musicians. “In those days there were many men who played the tin whistle in the streets,” Ethel recollected later, “many of them very well indeed, and they were always a pleasure to us both. [Frank Kidson] would bring them in and talk
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