Marrow Bones

English Folk Songs from the Hammond and Gardiner Manuscripts

Selected and Edited by Frank Purslow

Revised with New Notes and Commentaries by Malcolm Douglas and Steve Gardham

Foreword by Vic Gammon

First published in 1965, Marrow Bones drew on the existence of largely unpublished folk song collections made by Henry and Robert Hammond and Dr George Gardiner between 1904 and 1909, chiefly in Dorset and Hampshire, which are held in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House in London. This revised and corrected edition includes extensive new background notes and commentary.

Here are 103 songs of comedy and tragedy, of love fulfilled and love denied, of war and peace, of land and sea, of the marvellous and the mundane. Songs both great and small that our ancestors took to their hearts and made part of their lives, which might very easily have been lost forever. They are presented here for new generations of singers and musicians. Some are very old, others less so. The world that made them is gone, but they speak to the human condition today just as they did a century and more ago.

Published EFDSS 2007