Yorkshire in Music Trivia Quiz

Answer: the nineteenth

Let's begin with the bald facts: the fine, stirring melody was originally published in 1805 as "Cranbrook", a Methodist hymn tune from the pen of a Methodist shoemaker called Thomas Clark, set to some pre-existing and drearily depressing religious lyrics which I'm sure no sane person today would wish to be bothered with. (The words to "While shepherds watched their flocks by night", it was later discovered on the other hand, fit the music very well, and to hear this arrangement performed by a tip-top choir is a genuinely exciting experience.)

It's believed that during the 1850s some members of a chapel choir in West Yorkshire, while enjoying a day's ramble in the famous local beauty spot of Ilkley Moor - celebrated for its volatile and often extreme weather conditions - composed their own would-be comical lyrics, in their own version of West Riding dialect, to the now-familiar hymn tune:

"Wheer 'as tha' bin sin' ah saw thee?
On Ilkla' Moor baht 'at!"

and so on, and so forth. It's not known for sure which town the chapel-choir ramblers were from, but suspicion has traditionally fallen most readily on the then thriving wool town of Halifax. These doggerel rhymes were finally published in 1916, and must have brought much innocent joy to Yorkshire folk during the dark days of World War One. As the years wore on this novel arrangement of the old melody became well known all over England, and it still is. (It's no joy at all, though, to hear it attempted by drunken Leeds United supporters after a victorious football match!)

Finally, a titbit which many people may not know: during the Yorkshire Day celebrations in 2013 in the little spa town of Ilkley, the larger-than-life West Yorkshire-born actor Brian Blessed performed a rap version of the song: with a bit of doggedness you can probably find a snatch of it on youtube, although sadly it's only about twenty seconds long and Blessed doesn't seem to have properly warmed up to full boom at this point, and is only just getting into his not-so-often-heard native Mexborough accent: "Yer insane to go up t' Ilkla' Moor without yer 'at!"

Answer: she watched a TV adaptation of the novel and then read the book

Kate's "Wuthering Heights" is several cuts above your average pop hit, and a remarkable piece of music even for a super-talented teenager to have produced. As far as I'm aware, the young singer from south-east England had no previous connection with Yorkshire, but - having apparently watched a BBC adaptation of Emily Bronte's masterpiece and then read the book itself - she responded dramatically to the unique atmosphere of the supernatural moorland landscape conjured up by the novelist - and empathised immediately, as she read, with the female protagonist, her namesake Catherine Earnshaw. The singer is taken to be Cathy's ghost at the window, begging to be let in from the cold, and the song's eerie appeal was enormously strengthened by Kate Bush's extraordinary vocal range and also by her eye-catching dance routine when she performed the piece.

One critic, Simon Reynolds, described the song as "Gothic romance distilled into four-and-a-half minutes of gaseous rhapsody", and the Guardian's Rebecca Nicholson remarked of the young singer's initial appearances on "Top of the Pops" in 1978 that they "cemented her public image as an ethereal spirit, embodying the essence of Cathy through a combination of wide eyes, floaty fabrics and wild choreography." (Wikipedia informs us helpfully that in the song "The real world is associated with the past tense and a tonic of A major, whereas Cathy's afterlife is associated with the present tense and a tonic of D♭ major.") The lyrics - apart from the striking opening line "Out on the wily, windy moors" - are not very special, but since they are subservient to the turbulent sweep of the music, they don't need to be.

In so far as Kate Bush was inspired by this part of West Yorkshire, it was clearly indirectly - through Emily Bronte's singular genius in bringing to symbolic life the wild place where she lived out her inwardly turbulent thirty years on earth. In 2018, in the bicentenary year of Emily's birth, the sixty-year-old Kate travelled to Haworth to unveil a poem she had written for the novelist inscribed on a memorial stone - a poem that will survive, however madly buffeted by the West Riding elements, for passing travellers to read until no one in the world can read any longer.

Answer: Scarborough Fair/Canticle

It was, of course, that illustrious "folk-rock" pair Simon & Garfunkel who brought out this famous single: they had learned a version of the song from the English traditional folk musician Martin Carthy (and then apparently omitted to include his name in the recording credits, much to his chagrin). The piece was first included as a track on the duo's LP "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" before being released as a single in order to capitalise on its fairly evident commercial potential. The full title of the track is "Scarborough Fair/Canticle", since the main song is quite cleverly counterpointed on the disc with one of Paul Simon's own compositions called "Canticle". The over-luscious instrumental backing of the arrangement scarcely does justice to the austere beauty of the originally unaccompanied folk song, but if it helped any thoughtful and musically sensitive 1960s teenagers to explore the riches of the English folk song tradition for themselves, its undeniably commercial features might perhaps be grudgingly forgiven.

"Scarborough Fair" is a wistful, melancholy love song ostensibly about a fair in the historic North Yorkshire seaside town which gives it its name. A lot of the song's beauty probably derives from the evident contrast between the slow, sad melody and the playful, dreamlike lyrics which list a series of apparently impossible tasks which - the song always makes me feel - would only prove impossible to someone who is not in love. The lyrics have sundry variants, as one would expect from a song of this genre, and I have a preference for the concise, easily understandable and familiar version performed by Simon & Garfunkel.

"Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and time...
Remember me to one who lives there:
She once was a true love of mine.

"Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme)
Without any seams or needlework,
Then she'll be a true love of mine.

"Tell her to find me an acre of land
(Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme)
Between the salt ocean and the sea strand,
Then she'll be a true love of mine...

and so on.

The song first appeared in recognisable form in "Traditional Tunes", published in 1891 by the great Leeds-born folk-song collector Frank Kidson, who apparently collected it from a singer in the North Yorkshire coastal town of Whitby. The melody in Kidson's version is a little different from that made familiar to us by Simon & Garfunkel - but both these variants of the tune are in the ancient Dorian mode, which gives a distinctively bittersweet feel to the whole piece.

Answer: Kingston-upon-Hull

"You've just been through a long, dark winter ... now spring's coming in and you've been working since sunrise ... but you've been thinking all afternoon about a pint of beer or two in the local pub. And when you're there you listen to a group like the Watersons singing about the lives of you and those around you who support each other, and just for a few hours you forget about it all and you smile, sing and laugh and things just get a little bit easier again for a while." Someone posted this eloquent comment on youtube in response to Episode 1 of a BBC documentary from 1983 called "The Good Old Way", which homes in on the Waterson family's remarkable singing group.

Nestling on the north bank of the majestic Humber Estuary in East Yorkshire, Kingston-upon-Hull - known to all and sundry simply as "Hull" - boasts a history and culture truly astonishing until we remember that it was once a great seaport open to anything in terms of international culture that the world might choose to bring to it. The city's most famous - and entirely untutored - home-grown singing group, the Watersons, got going properly in the early 1960s, searching for old folk songs wherever they could find them, performing at local clubs to enthusiastic acclaim, and releasing lovingly-produced LPs which are now collectors' items to those who revel in this kind of music. By 1975 one member of the four-strong group - a cousin - had been replaced by none other than Martin Carthy, the singer from London who had taught Simon and Garfunkel "Scarborough Fair" and who was now Norma Waterson's husband. (The couple's daughter Eliza, who inherited her mother's vocal and fiddle-playing skills, has deservedly made a name for herself too and is still performing on the folk scene as I write in the mid 2020s.)

The group's powerful, deliciously-harmonised and deeply emotional rendition of old traditional songs was usually unaccompanied by any instruments, and in this they can be compared to the legendary Copper Family from Sussex, who alone deserve to be bracketed with them. Of course, the Watersons did not restrict themselves thematically to songs about their native county, but they were perhaps especially intimately familiar with these, having discovered early on a complete edition of one of the legendary Frank Kidson's collections of traditional English folk songs in Hull Public Library. On top of this, though, a considerable number of other Yorkshire songs have been discovered since Kidson's day, some of them by the Watersons themselves from surviving singers in the old style.

In the documentary mentioned above, Mike Waterson talks penetratingly about the need to feel the passion in the songs when you perform them, and to make them fresh and new every time you do so. Sadly, the news coming out of Hull in recent years is that the young generation is no longer attracted to the town's folk clubs, even the once very popular and vibrant room above the historic Blue Bell Inn, now filled up with old-timers only. No doubt something similar is true elsewhere in the county too, as well as further afield - times have changed, for better or for worse.

Answer: The Land of Green Ginger

No one really knows when exactly this narrow sidestreet in the old part of town stopped being called "Old Beverley Street" and took on its present glorious cognomen. The powers that be in Hull have woven a web of mystery around the name's origin, although since it's known that vast quantities of "green ginger" - undried root ginger cured with lemon juice, I believe - were imported and stored here in the seventeenth century, the search for an alternative explanation hardly seems necessary. The persistent air of mystery about the name, however, has had creative spin-offs, including a Winifred Holtby novel, a children's story by Beatrix Potter, a television play by Alan Plater and even the appellation of one of the modern streamlined express trains which travel regularly between Hull Paragon station and London King's Cross. Let's just concentrate, however, on the musical spin-offs, which are admittedly not always of the very highest quality.

In fact, I only liked one of the musical celebrations of this special street in Hull that I found on youtube, and it was the quirkiest of the lot - a merry little ditty quite fanatically devoted to singing the praises of the real-life Land of Green Ginger. Potential listeners should be warned that the anonymous singer is no Pavarotti, although he does at least sing in tune; and the lyrics he enunciates so crisply, while very far from being great poetry, do convey a sense of the brisk local humour, and he sings them with a breathless relish that is quite difficult not to warm to.

Everything you could possibly want to see and hear in the Land of Green Ginger is included in this song in a quickfire list, from the alleged "smallest window in the world" in the wall of the George Hotel to views of Whitefriargate - pronounced "Whitefriggit" (and famous, I believe, for its William Wilberforce associations) - and the melodious bells of historic Holy Trinity Church, once the largest parish church in England and now officially known as "Hull Minster". The song is certainly a lot of fun, but no one is likely to want to listen to it too often, I should think. In any case, The Land of Green Ginger is only one street among many in this remarkable city.

Answer: The Pontefract Cake Junkie

I made this title up, although I very much wish that Thackray - who died, too young, in 2002 - had lived to pen one of his satirical but compassionate ditties about the true story of a local woman who ended up in hospital after overdosing on those innocuous-looking little black licquorice-flavoured sweets called Pontefract cakes (even though they are not actually cakes at all) made in the town of that name.

In "Go Little Swale", less humorous in mood than many of his other songs, Thackray is inspired by the humble Swale - reportedly England's fastest-flowing river - as he takes us on a leisurely trip down its scenically delightful North Yorkshire surroundings and past its evocatively-named hamlets: "down by the river edge where wagtails are trotting/by Booze, by Muker, by Gunnerside, by Crackpots...over the poor bridges which hunch their old crookbacks/by Thwaite, by Grinton, by Hero, by Buttertubs..." (a map of Upper Swaledale is a found poem indeed!). It was in this very neck of the woods, though, as he records in one of his bleakest songs, that the shepherdess Molly Metcalfe, a relative of Thackray's from an older generation, had died at the age of 28 after what the singer called "a swine of a life" and "was found rotting with her ghastly sheep" on the moorside. Even today, I suspect there can be few tougher places in England to live in than Yorkshire if you don't get the rub of the green early in life.

"The Hair of the Widow of Bridlington" is a savage attack on certain malicious gossips in that eponymous coastal town, and what they do to a fun-loving forty-something woman when she doesn't conform to their narrow-minded expectations. Thackray's anger evaporates at the end when it turns out that the widow has had the last laugh after all.

In "The Castleford Ladies' Magical Circle", the said ladies - each armed for the occasion "with a Woolworth's broomstick and a tabby cat" ; bring some pretty droll verses out of Thackray:

"Their husbands fumble at snooker down the club,
Unaware of the devilish jiggery-poke, and rub-a-dub-dub,
As Elizabeth Jones and Lily O'Grady
And three or four more married ladies
Are frantically dancing naked for Beelzebub!"

Thackray has rightly been compared to Noel Coward for the dry barbed wit of his lyrics, and his laconic comic timing - both in singing and in speaking - was second to none. Unfortunately, his singing voice was so poor that he never achieved the widespread popularity that his wickedly funny lyrics and tuneful inventiveness seemed to deserve.

Answer: Frederick Delius

The composer's distinctly un-English surname is accounted for by his German parentage; and how much love Frederick Delius had for Yorkshire, even though he was born and brought up there, might perhaps be questioned by some. Musically, he certainly owed more to French and German influences than he did to any English composer, although somehow that never seems to prevent his work from sounding quintessentially, even achingly, English. He has been classified by sundry critics as "a Romantic of the Impressionist School" with "a harmonic idiom ... which tends to chromaticism", whose music is "artistically successful within a strictly defined and narrow emotional and expressive range".

Delius's bizarre and faintly scandalous life - in middle age he became blind and chronically paralysed after contracting syphilis in his youth - was mostly spent well away from his native Yorkshire after the age of 22, and my task here was to identify at least one of his published works which can claim inspiration from the White Rose County in one way or another. I finally struck lucky: "North Country Sketches", a suite for small orchestra, was written in 1913-14 at his home at Grez-sur-Loing, near Paris, where he had earlier settled with his German artist wife after twenty years of wandering and music-making in North America and Northern Europe. In 1915 the piece, which contains many folksong-like snatches of melody that could easily be traditional Yorkshire tunes (though I haven't been able to identify any), was first conducted in London in 1915 by Thomas Beecham - who later became the world's leading Delius interpreter.

Wikipedia asserts that, contemplating the wild Yorkshire moors as a teenager, "The wastelands had once given him the idea to write an opera with 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Brontë as the libretto." In fact, however, the music of "North Country Sketches" doesn't support the idea that it was the stormier features of Yorkshire weather that most inspired the composer. Be that as it may, the more I listen to this bewitching little orchestral suite the more I find to delight in it and can savour what Beecham called the composer's "extraordinary kinship with nature". The four movements of the piece depict the seasons of the year as they move almost imperceptibly from autumn to spring (with summer missing, as though it were considered an insignificant detail in the North of England!).

After the day-dreamy bliss of "Autumn", the second movement - "Winter Landscape" - conjures up visions of icy winds, snowdrifts, and icicles, while the two later movements, entitled "Dance" and "The March of Spring", are convincingly boisterous - but what I hear chiefly in the music here is sweet birdsong, fierce March winds and not-always-very-gentle April showers, rather than the terrifying noises of a full-blooded moorland thunderstorm. Perhaps, after all, that is why Delius left summer out of his equation in this work - not only because it would have unbalanced the entire piece, but also because his compositional technique might have been over-stretched by the necessity of such a ferocious outburst of uncontrollable noise. Better to evoke languid summer days with cloudless skies elsewhere rather than attempt a musical portrayal of the all-too-typical weather to be found on the moors above Bradford!

Answer: Yan Tan Tethera

The Swaledale sheep-counting dialect also interested Jake Thackray, the subject of a previous question, and his morose song about the tragic sheep-minder Molly Metcalfe makes use of it. This rhyming dialect, which has variants in several other Yorkshire dales, is based on the ancient Celtic language of Old Cumbric, which I believe was spoken over most of northern England in the Iron Age and later, but had largely died out by the sixth century except in sheep-minding and knitting circles. Shepherds counted to twenty, cut a notch on their crook or transferred a stone from one hand to another, and then started again from the beginning. The words would not, of course, have been written down, but this is how they are usually represented today: "Yan, tan, tether, mether, pip; azer, sezar, akker, conter, dick; yanadick, tanadick, tetheradick, metheradick, bumfit; yanabum, tanabum, metherabum, tetherabum, jiggit." (The Watersons, the subject of another earlier question, also performed a "Shepherd's Song" based on these dialect words: "I count 'em up to jiggit, at jiggit there's a notch:/There's more to bein' a shepherd than to bein' on watch.")

Harrison Birtwistle, later knighted for his services to music, was a celebrated prodigy from Lancashire on the other side of the Pennines, who later moved much further south to Wiltshire. In the 1980s he decided to write an opera based on this sheep-counting dialect material, with a libretto by the Leeds poet Tony Harrison. Although the result, "Yan Tan Tethera", is actually set on the Wiltshire Downs, the spirit of the White Rose County imbues the whole thing: the hero is a shepherd who sings in a lovely homespun Yorkshire accent and, whenever he is onstage, infuses the whole undertaking with the spirit of his home county. As befits a composer whose first instrument was the clarinet, Birtwistle produces a vast amount of delicate and appealing music for wind instruments throughout the work, although anyone wishing to look up the television adaptation available on youtube should be warned that the opera also features talking rams, a chorus of singing sheep, and various other visual oddities which may take some people more than a while to get used to. I have not yet been able to find a description of the plot, which made everything a little bewildering to me at first blush - but the quality of the music would certainly repay repeated listening.

Answer: The Dragon of Wantley

"In that pleasant district of Merry England which is watered by the River Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest ... Here haunted of yore the fabulous Dragon of Wantley." Thus wrote Walter Scott in the opening paragraph of "Ivanhoe"; and there are also later incidental references to this same fabulous creature in the works of Dickens and Trollope. In Edith Nesbit's "Railway Children", there is even a steam train christened "The Worm of Wantley" by the story's eponymous urchins. The roots of the legend go back at least to the seventeenth century, "Wantley" being then an alternative name for Wharncliffe in South Yorkshire.

Lampe, a talented composer in the baroque style and an expert bassoonist, arrived in London in 1724 as a young man and quite soon found himself at the heart of the capital's musical life. Wikipedia reports that he "wrote operatic works in English in defiance of the vogue for Italian opera popularised by Handel". He is best known today for "The Dragon of Wantley", his "mock opera" which takes the old Yorkshire legend to new comic heights, and which broke all box-office records when it was first put on, running for 69 nights. His collaborator in "The Dragon" was Henry Carey, a poet and musician (creator of the lovely contemporary ballad "Sally in our Alley"), whose witty libretto turned out to be the perfect match for Lampe's deliciously mischievous musical score. The pair were partly poking fun at Handel's operatic practice, which insisted upon all the words - however crass - being sung, never spoken (and the singing dragon in this opera is well worth staying to the end for, I promise you).

As for modern productions of this opera, members of the chorus have a golden opportunity, if their director permits, to dress up as the imagined wild men and hobbledehoys of South Yorkshire and their buxom womenfolk who are, as the opera opens, rapidly being eaten up a few at a time offstage by the terrifying monster in their midst. Richmond Opera, whose complete performance of "The Dragon" can be found on youtube, is an outstanding amateur company which (I confess I was initially disappointed to find) hails not from Richmond in Yorkshire but from its southern namesake, Richmond-on-Thames in Greater London.

The saviour of the troubled Wantley community turns out to be the local landowner, Moore of Moore Hall - a somewhat erratic hero who, on his first appearance, leads the chorus in a quirky drinking song while unsteadily clasping a bottle of ale:

"Zeno, Plato, Aristotle
All were lovers of the bottle:
Poets, painters and musicians,
Churchmen, lawyers and physicians
All admired a pretty lass,
All required a merry glass!"

(Is this the original inspiration for Monty Python's "Australian Philosophers' Song"? asks one poster on youtube.) Admirably played by the Richmond Opera's leading tenor, Moore - replete in medieval armour - finally dispatches the dragon, having disdained the use of a sword, with a hefty kick to its hindquarters, the only vulnerable part of its anatomy. He thereby wins over the girl of his dreams, and earns the undying gratitude of all his friends and neighbours as the curtain falls.

Answer: The Lass of Richmond Hill

Let's get one thing clear right at the outset: the hill named in the title is the one in Lower Swaledale, North Yorkshire, adjacent to the atmospheric little town of Richmond. "Richmond was a romantic town then," writes the author Christopher Winn, referring to the time the song was written, "and is a romantic town now, with its steep, cobbled market square, crooked alleyways and handsome Georgian shops and houses." Fanatics in the south of England have been claiming the song for Richmond in West London (or Richmond in Surrey, as it used to be) since before the ink was dry on the original musical score - but their deluded fancies can be safely disregarded!

"The Lass of Richmond Hill" is not a traditional folk ballad, but a very beautiful eighteenth-century art song - some of whose quality comes out strongly in the recordings made by the late Kenneth McKellar, singing with orchestral accompaniment rather than just a piano. McKellar's pure tenor voice does wonderful justice to the sheer tunefulness of the piece, if not always to the subtlety of feeling that could have been expressed by a rather more varied tempo. (You can also, if you have the stomach for it, find on youtube a video called "Austentation - Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill", about which I will say nothing except to warn you that its musical sophistication does not remotely match the operatically-trained McKellar's.)

The lyrics to the piece were written by Leonard McNally, a poet and playwright from Dublin, but also a barrister (about whose devious political activities in Ireland at the behest of the British government the least said the better). Leaving that aside, the love of his life was a girl from Swaledale who lived at a property called Hill House in Richmond and whom he married in 1787. McNally was a mediocre poet who wrote in an artificial, sentimental and head-in-the-clouds poeticising style, and the phrase in the song "a rose without a thorn" may not have been his original invention: it's a cliché now and was quite possibly already one then.

James Hook, who wrote the astonishingly fine music to the song, was evidently a distinguished teacher, flautist, pianist and organist (those were the days when London tea houses entertained their customers with live organ recitals!). He never wrote any other songs in his long life which captured the public imagination like "The Lass of Richmond Hill" (he did, however, compose an attractive organ concerto in the classical style of his age, and an even better clarinet concerto). In Vienna in 1789 the minor composer J. P. Hummel published two sets of piano variations on "The Lass of Richmond Hill", which I fancy would sound a lot better on a period instrument than they do on the modern piano.