Percy Grainger ethnographic wax cylinders

Long description:

Recordings in this collection can be played by anyone.

340 recordings of traditional singers in Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire and London made by composer, arranger and folk song collector Percy Grainger.

George Percy Aldridge Grainger (8 July 1882 – 20 February 1961) was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist. His keen interest in English folksongs often led him to set traditional tunes into his compositions, such as Shepherd’s Hey (1911), Lincolnshire Posy (1940) and Country Gardens (1919).

In 1906 Grainger became the first folk song collector to record traditional music in the UK with a mechanical recording device. Grainger recorded a number of singers (and one fiddle player) in 1906 and 1908 in Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire and London using a phonograph, which recorded onto a delicate wax cylinder. These cylinders were transferred onto lacquer discs by the Library of Congress in 1940, which are the copies from which the recordings available to listen to here were sourced from. Also among these transfers by the Library of Congress were Grainger’s recordings of Danish folksongs made alongside folklorist Evald Tang Kristensen between 1922 and 1927, and Maori songs recorded by Alfred Knocks in New Zealand during 1907.

Grainger first encountered singers such as Joseph Taylor, George Gouldthorpe and George Wray performing in a folk singing competition at Brigg fair, Lincolnshire, in 1905. Not content with the transcriptions of the melodies and words he had made during this event, Grainger returned a year later with an Edison phonograph to take down far more accurate records of these and other songs. In 1906 and in 1908 he continued to record singers in Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire and in London, preserving over 300 traditional songs.

The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library hold a number of resources relating to these recordings in the form of transcriptions that were handwritten and published by Grainger himself. These include notations made during the 1905 competition, detailed transcriptions from the 1906 and 1908 recordings, and printed score from published books.

This collection has been catalogued and made accessible via British Library Sounds thanks to a grant from the Folk Music Fund with the research assistance of Steve Roud. The British Library has digitised these lacquer disks as part of its ongoing audio preservation work.