The People's Songbag

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30965, 22 January 1966, Page 5

The People's Songbag

The Widow’s Secret

(Specially written for “The Press” by

DERRICK ROONEY.)

KOLK-LORE enthusiasts be--1 fore their interest is much advanced learn to accept without question odd characters in odder situations.

Jack Elliott, one of the best of the present-day American folk-singers, might be seen on one of his trips to London wearing cowboy boots and a string tie at a symphony concert.

Woody Guthrie stepped out from his flat in New York one night to post a letter at the corner mailbox —and the next communication his wife had from him was a postcard from California three months later.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford, one of the greatest American folk-singers, combined the sedentary and the peripatetic: he was both a wandering minstrel and a small-town lawyer in North Carolina. Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly), Guthrie’s Negro counterpart as a culture-hero came out of the Southern prison farms where he was the lead man on the cottonpicking gangs, boasting that he could pick a thousand pounds of cotton a day—a huge man who became a huge legend. Ironically he was crippled, then killed in his greying years in New York by poliomyelitis. John A. Lomax, the man who discovered Leadbelly, was himself somewhat of an oddball. Before folk-lore became his all-consuming passion and he moved north to found the Library of Congress's Folk-lore Archives, he spent his vacations from the Southern college where

he taught among the cowboys, listening and avidly collecting their songs and yarns—much to the scorn of his colleagues. But the man who probably most often found himself in bizarre situations was the pioneer English folk-lorist Cecil Sharp, who spent much of his life wandering around out-of-the-way hamlets in England and in the Appalachian region of the United States. One of his experiences in a West Country village had Hitchcockian overtones: Why did the vicar blush? Why were the parlour curtains drawn?

The setting was the village of Hambridge. Sharp, on holiday from his job as head of the Hampstead Conservatoire, was staying with the Rev. Charles Marson at the vicarage, where the handyman was named England and specialised in “they wold ancient songs.” Together Sharp and Marson visited the houses in the village persuading the villagers to sing all the old songs they could remember while Sharp took down the music and Marson the words.

Much to Sharp’s delight a handsome widow whom they visited with some reluctance on the part of the vicar proved to be the best source of material in the village. She clenched her fists, closed her eyes and sang song after song for a whole afternoon. Later came the denouement: Sharp discovered that, in her spotlessly clean cottage, the widow carried on the ancient and respectable trade of village whore.