Green Bushes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Green Bushes is an English folk song (Roud #1040, Laws P2) which is featured in the second movement of Vaughan Williams's English Folk Song Suite, in Percy Grainger's Green Bushes (Passacaglia on an English Folksong), and in George Butterworth's The Banks of Green Willow. The melody is very similar to that of the "Lost Lady Found" movement of Percy Grainger's Lincolnshire Posy, and to "Cutty Wren".
According to Roud and Bishop[1]
This was an immensely popular song, collected many times across England, although not so often elsewhere. It was also very popular with nineteenth-century broadside printers.[2]
The song first appears in broadsides of the 1820s or 1830s. Its popularity was hugely increased by a popular melodrama The Green Bushes, or A Hundred Years Ago by John Baldwin Buckstone, first performed in 1845. The heroine of the play made repeated reference to the song and sang a few verses, with the result that the sheet music was published soon after.[3]
One of, if not the, earliest recordings is a 1907 performance by Joseph Taylor, collected on wax cylinder by the musicologist Percy Grainger in 1907.[4][5] It was digitised by the British Library and made available online in 2018.[5]
