Country Cryes

Extract

I have nothing very extraordinary to communicate to you, and I do not know that you will think what you hear to-night is worth the trouble of coming to; but it has occurred to me that this would be an opportunity for many of you just to make the acquaintance of a particular class of music with which I have been rather intimately connected for some little time. Most of you know that I have been able to recover certain music composed by the best musicians in the early seventeenth century embodying fortunately nearly 150 of the old Cryes of London, many of them not at all known; and a very interesting study it has been to me, and I hope interesting also to those who have heard them. We are anxious nowadays to recover and preserve old folk songs. A great mine of these real old Cryes, beautiful old tunes many of them, had been overlooked. They had never been printed so far as I know. Those that have come before me have all been in manuscript.