Green Bushes is an English folk song (Roud #1040, Laws P2) which is featured in the second movement of Ralph Vaughan Williams' English Folk Song Suite, in Percy Grainger's Green Bushes (Passacaglia on an English Folksong), and in George Butterworth's The Banks of Green Willow. The melody is very similar to that of the Lost Lady Found movement of Percy Grainger's Lincolnshire Posy, and to The Cutty Wren.
According to Roud and Bishop
"This was an immensely popular song, collected many times across England, although not so often elsewhere. It was also very popular with nineteenth-century broadside printers."
The song first appears in broadsides of the 1820s or 1830s. Its popularity was hugely increased by a popular melodrama The Green Bushes, or A Hundred Years Ago by William Buckstone, first performed in 1845. The heroine of the play made repeated reference to the song and sang a few verses, with the result that the sheet music was published soon after.
Read more about Green Bushes: Lyrics
Famous quotes containing the words green and/or bushes:
“We mustn’t touch them yet, but see and see!
And what was green would by and by be gold.
Their name was called the Gold Hesperidee.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“All praise of the hawk on fire in hawk-eyed dusk be sung,
When his viperish fuse hangs looped with flames under the brand
Wing, and blest shall
Young
Green chickens of the bay and bushes cluck, “dilly dilly,
Come let us die.””
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)