Folk Music, Harmony Singing and the West Gallery Choirs

If you haven’t heard a full West Gallery Choir complete with the old instruments then Vital Spark, which is performing at Clodock Church, Longtown, Herefordshire on December 28th at 7pm, weather permitting, is an evening out you should not miss. There is no charge for entry but there will be a retiring collection:

Traditional Old English Carols by Candlelight
with Vital Spark West Gallery Singers and Musicians
plus Mince Pies and Mulled Wine

Folk Music, Harmony Singing and the West Gallery Choirs

The first time I really heard this type of singing was at the famous Troubadour venue in the Old Brompton Road. I knew nothing about folk music but it was a cheap and warm evening out in the winter of 1962. I could just about afford the ticket and the cheapest meal on the menu; cheese salad. Little did I know that people like Martin Carthy, Bob Davenport, Red Sullivan, Robin Hall and Jimmy McGregor, Colin Wilkie and many others were the emerging establishment of the English folk revival. An evening in, by contrast ,was usually involved a feeble attempt to learn to play the guitar. In my case a rather dead sounding product of the now well known guitar rush of the 1950’s.
Although I enjoyed the sound it was only in recent years that I learnt the basic theory of harmony singing and started to understand what was involved. I had heard many harmonies without realising and of course this type of folk singing is most famously preserved by the Copper Family of Rottingdean in Sussex and the singers of various communities up and down the country. Many still singing Christmas carols of this sort in similar styles. It was only a few years ago that a fuller picture began to emerge when I first heard Vital Spark sing in Clodock Church. It was then that I first heard the term West Gallery singing.
As the name indicates it is the music which used to be sung in the West Galleries of our churches from about the start of the 18th century until it met its demise at the hands of the reforming Victorians. The first time I heard this music I recognised what to me was a ‘folk sound’. Where had this music been all those years. It was of course always there but like so many things during a working life my music had had to play second fiddle to surviving in the conveyor belt of rat race which rarely left an evening free for musical outings. OK, I now know that I should have made more of an effort but I realise that this is easily said now I am an escapee of the system.
Unfortunately West Gallery music did not escape another form of attack, church reform. My reaction to hearing Vital Spark for the first time was very much along the lines ‘ We was robbed’. Granted, the thieves, a combination of the anglo catholic Oxford Movement and the introduction of the more manageable Church Organ, has created a new tradition of English Church music which we would not like to lose, but even so, a rich heritage has been hidden away and only in recent times has it started to come out of the closet.
You have only to read Under the Green Wood Tree by Thomas hardy to see the resentment which was felt on both sides as the new formal and spiritual music replaced the more melodic and energetic tunes which would have been sung the night before in the pub before the choir managed to be in place on a Sunday morning. Luckily, like many of our old English songs, our ancestors who settled in America in the 17th had continued to sing in the style of the old country and happily preserved the old styles.

A FolkWorkshops publication by John Baxter with acknowledgments to Wikipedia.