Sabine Baring-Gould - Folk Songs

Folk Songs

He regarded his principal achievement to be the collection of folk songs that he made with the help of the ordinary people of Devon and Cornwall. His first book of songs, Songs and Ballads of the West (1889–91), was published in four parts between 1889 and 1891. The musical editor for this collection was Henry Fleetwood Sheppard, though some of the songs included were noted by Baring-Gould's other collaborator Frederick Bussell.

Baring-Gould and Sheppard produced a second collection named A Garland of Country Songs during 1895. A new edition of Songs of the West was proposed for publication in 1905. Sheppard had died in 1901 and so the folk song collector Cecil Sharp was invited to undertake the musical editorship for the new edition. Sharp and Baring-Gould also collaborated on English Folk Songs for Schools during 1907. This collection of 53 songs was widely used in British schools for the next 60 years.

Although he had to modify the words of some songs which were too rude for the time, he left his original manuscripts for future students of folk song, thereby preserving many beautiful pieces of music and their lyrics which otherwise might have been lost.

A Fair Copy of the folk songs he collected, together with the notebooks used for gathering information in the field, were given by Baring-Gould to Plymouth Public Library in 1914 and deposited with the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office in 2006. These, together with the folk-song manuscripts from Baring-Gould's personal library discovered at in 1998, were published as a microfiche edition in 1998. In 2011 the complete collection of folk song manuscripts (including two notebooks not included in the microfiches edition) were digitized and published online by the Devon Tradition Project in association with the English Folk Dance and Song Society as part of the 'Take Six' project undertaken by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. Thirty boxes of additional manuscript material on other topics (the Killerton manuscripts) are kept in the Devon Record Office in Exeter.

Cecil Sharp dedicated his English Folk Song—Some Conclusions to Baring-Gould.