01	The Three Ravens						02:52
	02	Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Hair						01:53
	03	Sweet Nymph, Come To Thy Lover						01:41
	04	I Go Before My Darling						01:26
	05	The Oak And The Ash						03:11
	06	Barbara Allen						02:36
	07	Lord Rendall						04:04
	08	Water Is Wide						02:35
	09	The Tailor And The Mouse						01:31
	10	Down By The Sally Garden's						02:21
	11	I Will Give My Love An Apple						01:47
	12	Miraculous Love's Wounding						02:57
	13	Sweet Kate						01:36
	14	Bushes And Briars						02:36
	15	The Foggy, Foggy Dew						02:10
	16	She Moved Through The Fair						03:44
	17	The Evening Prayer						01:01

Folksongs

For several years the music-loving public has subscribed to two particularly tenacious myths: the first being the absence of any such thing as great English music, and the second the mediocrity of the forms of English folk-music. Hence, apart from other considerations, the interest of this recording. Those who, whether by taste, conscious choice or perversity, prefer "non-serious" music will discover another side of it when, on consulting the list of songs presented here, they come upon the American folk-group Peter, Paul and Mary's The three ravens and one of the most successful items in the realm of folk, Black is the colour of my true love's hair, sung by Joan Baez among others. This fact is not only curious, but attests to the timelessness of folklore in general and of the folksong in particular, as well as to the incontestable genius of the people for melodic invention. If the value of a work resides in its ability to resist the passage of time, many a reputedly "eternal" and far more ambitious work of music must be judged a lesser work of genius than these gems of concision and emotion. And many a prejudice is bound to fall by the wayside.
Long before the contemporary discovery of folk-music many researchers in various parts of the world were assembling the fragments of the ruins of this music, collecting (like Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary) the last survivors of the oral tradition and resurrecting manuscripts discovered by accident or good fortune. Although we can never know how many marvels have vanished with the centuries, either because of the extinction of their last tenants or because of the negligence or modesty of their creators or performers, we are now able to identify the popular sources of classical musique and of American folk-music, a new culture forged by a new country out of disparate elements. It is impossible to give even approximate dates to the songs Alfred Deller has assembled for this record. A study of the music reveals nothing whereas a certain amount of evidence is contained in the words. In brief, these folk-songs are very old. The references to knights in armour, hinds, the importance of nature, the sun and small birds, a simple tailor or weaver, the simplicity and artlessness of the love stories all permit us to place them between the 13th and the 17th centuries.
In England attempts to collect the largest possible number of folk-songs took place in several stages. In 1765 Bishop Percy published the first collection in the Reliques based on a manuscript dating from about 1650 discovered in Shropshire. This work was of major importance in Europe and was as significant to the development of Romanticism as the Knaben Wunderhom songs collected later in Germany. In 1843 the Rev. Broadwood published another collection called Sussex Songs. The Folk Song Society was founded in 1898 and in 1903 Cecil Sharp and Charles Marson published Folk Songs of Somerset. Sharp went on to collect a total of over 3000 English folk tunes, in addition to 1600 melodies of English origin from the Appalachians in America. Several of these melodies had already been used as carols in the 15th century, in 16th century Masses and pieces for virginal in the 17th century. The composers of the Golden Age of English music made frequent use of popular music and Alfred Deller reported the discovery of The three ravens in Ravenscroft's Melismata (1611), of I will give my love an apple in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (under the name of Tell me Daphne), and of The oak and the ash in the same collection (under the title dQuodling's Delight). While this sort of thing was common usage at the period, it is indicative of the interest taken by English composers in the folk-songs of the country. The inclusion of works by Thomas Morley in this recording underlines what could be regarded as a kind of aesthetic and spiritual affinity between the works; the common sense and the candid poetry of the words have an irresistibly seductive power. It should not be forgotten that Morley was not only a composer hut also a theoretician and a publisher, a fact that would have brought him into closer contact with a large variety of compositions and with popular musicians than would have been the case with his contemporaries. In the domain of the madrigal and the canzonet derived from folk-music, he remains one of the uncon-tested masters of the form.
At a time when we are going farther and farther afield in the quest for new musical experiences, it is good to know that a source of popular music existed in England that sufficed to beguile every phase of life, to enrich the experience of serious composers through whom it influenced all of Europe, and that even today many of the tunes at the top of the Hit Parade are heavily indebted to it.