Quintessentially English: An Interview with South Yorkshire Fiddle Tune Researcher Paul Davenport
Sheffield is an industrial city in north central England, more noted for its checkered history of factories, slums and disease than any musical legacy. But in the midst of the industrial revolution, fiddle music managed to thrive in the hands of a small group of blind fiddlers who congregated at one of the local pubs. Some two hundred years later, they caught the attention of morris dance fiddler Paul Davenport as he was collecting old fiddle tune transcriptions for the South Riding Folk Arts Network. He ended up writing his Masters thesis at the University of Sheffield about them.
When I visited Sheffield in the summer of 2004, my inquiries about local fiddle traditions all led to Paul. He was kind enough to meet me at the Fat Cat Tavern one afternoon to share tunes, beers, and his well-researched perspectives on the history of English fiddling.
Paul: I published a number of tune books for the South Riding Folk Network a few years ago. And in the process of getting the information for these books –– they were all from manuscript collections, all unpublished, dating back to the early 19th century –– I rang a guy up to ask him about recording CDs and he said, “Well, I’ve got one of them.” I say, “One of what?” He says, “One of those manuscript books.” “Oh really?” He says, “Yeah, do you want to use it?”
The book was found in an attic. It was one of these incredibly romantic things –– discovered in an attic in an old fiddle case with an old fiddle in Worsborough near Barnsley. And it was full of hornpipes. 2/2 hornpipes, the cut-time hornpipes, which kind of dates it to being early 19th century, because the cut time doesn’t appear till about the Regency period (1811-1820) when we start to see the shift from 3/2 hornpipes or 9/8 hornpipes –– triple time tunes –– to the 2/2 tunes. I have a theory about that which I’ll tell you later. But this guy gave me a photocopy of this manuscript notebook and in it was mainly traditional stuff but some very weird stuff, mostly in flat keys. So that was a challenge from the start. I found myself having to learn to play in flat keys.
And I suppose the tunebook must have been for the fiddle since it came with a fiddle.
Absolutely. We knew they were fiddle tunes. But in the UK in general, the fiddle keys are perceived, rightly or wrongly, as being G, D, and A. [The key of] A mainly in Scotland because bagpipes are nominally tuned in A. But it’s kind of strange to find this body of tunes in flat keys.
People try to define English-style fiddling and you can’t. It defies explanation. You’ve got musicians like Bertie Clark, who was one of the fiddlers for Bampton Morris [dance group] many years ago. He was classically trained but when you heard him playing for the morris, he did something and it was just indescribable. But it was rhythmic. He’s there to drive the dance. That is the thing about English fiddling –– it has this verticality. It tends to be driven more by its rhythm than by the flow of the melody.
But what about this book of hornpipes? Was that more on the melodic side of things?
Well, David Shepherd of Blowzabella [traditional dance band from London], who is also a local, was talking about the cut-time hornpipe, the 2/2 hornpipe, as the quintessentially English tune. When you play one and you ornament it, the ornamentation just gravitates to 12/8. Given that the written text is nothing more than the framework, it’s sort of a suggestion –– “This is so and so’s hornpipe and it kind of might go like this, if you feel like it and if it’s all right with you. But if it’s not, then fine, play something entirely different. Or play it your own way.” There is that sort of sense with written text. So when you play a hornpipe, there is a tendency to use the triplet as the basic unit of division: da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da. Which is effectively playing in 12/8. So it’s an interesting style. People talk a lot about it being for step dancing and loads of people tell me that there is a tradition of step dancing in Sheffield, but I have never come across it. I’ve never come across a written reference. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist, but I’ve never found it. So we go back to this music manuscript. You have seventy-odd tunes, most of which are hornpipes, a very large proportion of which are in flat keys. And only one name –– we know that the owner of the book was Joshua Burnett. Joshua Burnett was a Scotsman. He came from Perth and his book was written around 1841. In the book, there is a hornpipe and it says “by James Knight, a blind man.” I thought no more of this until maybe Christmas ’97 when a friend of mine bought his wife a book called “A Pub on Every Corner” [by Freddy O’Connor]…. Anyway, he rang me up and he said, “Hey! I’ve found James Knight! James Knight was one of six famous blind fiddlers in Sheffield. They were really famous and they worked at a pub called the ‘Q in the Corner’, in Paradise Square.” I said, “Aha!” and I guess these last five years, I’ve been chasing these blind fiddlers. And a lot of their music seems to be in the Joshua Burnett notebook. Some of it is really difficult music, by folk standards. Others are merely quirky. And some of the stuff is just local variants of very familiar tunes. The blind fiddlers, they weren’t just fiddlers, they were musicians. It seems to go back to an extraordinary man called Samuel Goodlad. And Samuel Goodlad was first violin in the Assembly Orchestra. Assemblies were a bit like what you have in the States as “contra.” They were not like ceilidhs in the sense that you could just turn up and do any old thing and somebody would call the tunes. They were by subscription. They were for the more well-to-do, the merchant classes particularly. If you could get a lord or lady to be patron of an assembly, then that was excellent. And the upshot of this was that Samuel Goodlad was also the publican of a pub called the Q in the Corner. Which was in the corner of Paradise Square. It’s now a solicitor’s office. My investigation showed a large number of blind musicians congregated at this pub.
Now what you’ve got to bear in mind is that, from the point of view of Sheffield, which was an industrial city based on small unit industry –– so that a factory could be the size of the room you are sitting in now –– there was literally a pub at every corner. Because the work was incredibly dry. Sheffield was a city built on seven hills, like Rome. The sanitation in the Regency period was pretty bad, so what went out of the closet in the house on the top of the hill went through the ground and came up through the bedroom wall or the kitchen wall of the house at the bottom of the hill. That’s one of the reasons we had the great cholera epidemic in 1832. Anyway, to cut a long story short, there was a pub literally on every corner, one-room places, and people drank beer instead of water –– because of the sanitation problems. So beer was safer to drink than water, and that’s been a world-wide phenomenon. Yet, what I was finding was that these men traveled past any number of pubs to go to this one particular pub. Remember, they were blind men and walking considerable distances to get to that pub! One guy came from Darnall, which isn’t even within the city limits. And when they got there, the evidence is that they played music and there are some wonderful stories.
There is a story of Blind Stephen, who lived on Pinstone Street in Sheffield. Sam Goodlad had been down to London. London is the place where all fashion came from. It grew out of there and was disseminated across the country by whatever means. If you lived in London, you were fashionable. If you lived outside of London, you were provincial. There is a social connotation to both those terms. On this occasion, Goodlad had come back from London and he had learned a new tune. And all of these guys had phenomenal memories for learning tunes. He’d learned a new tune and he said, “Nobody knows this in Sheffield because it’s of the latest fashion” and the banter went on as you can imagine the banter went on in pubs and they said, “Well we reckon that one of these lads probably knows it,” indicating the blind musicians. “Oh,” he says, “I doubt it.” “Well,” they said, “Put your money where your mouth is.” So he bet them –– drinks all around and a mutton supper for the whole company if one of the blind fiddlers actually knew this tune. And so they took all the blind fiddlers outside. There were many pubs in the square, so they took them to a pub. And he went to get his fiddle, and when he came back he didn’t notice that a chap had come in through the door carrying a large sack which he put down on the floor to have a pint. So Sam plays the tune and everybody agreed it was a fine tune. And then they said, “Well, go and fetch the blind fiddlers back.” So they went off and the bloke with the sack picked up the sack and walked out. A short time later the blind fiddlers came back in the pub and made various attempts to play the tune and in the end Blind Stephen gets the fiddle and starts playing and says, “Oh, it wouldn’t go like this, would it?” And he played the perfect tune. And so Goodlad was forced to pay up. And what this tells us about Blind Stephen, it tells us quite a bit. It tells about his oral acuity. He could learn a tune in one hearing. The reason being because he was sitting in a sack at the time! He was quite a small man. [laughs] It’s a lovely story.
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For more information on some of the topics discussed in this article, check out these websites:
[Peter Anick, author of Mel Bay’s “Old Time Fiddling Across America,” teaches fiddle and mandolin and performs with the Massachusetts bluegrass band Wide Open Spaces (
www.wideospaces.com).]