Welcome to the ‘Songs of the West’ website

Sabine Baring-Gould was the first of the large-scale collectors of folk-songs in the late Victorian Era. He started to collect traditional songs in Devon and Cornwall in 1888 and, over the next decade, amassed a collection of approaching 2,000 songs. He was already well-known to the public as a best-selling novelist. His writing in books and magazine articles covered a wide range of topics including European travel, the topography and social history of the South-west, archaeology, sermons, hagiography and a number of other topics. His Bibliography includes nearly 1,200 items. You can read more about his life in the ‘Biographical Note’.

When he started to collect songs, he invited men who lived nearby to visit him at his home, Lew House. They would join him in the hall of the house where they would sit on the old oak settle by the fire, with a glass of beer. Baring-Gould would sit opposite them and would make a note of their songs, sometimes getting up to play over the tune they had sung to him on the piano.

He realised that he needed to get out to meet singers in their pubs and in their home. Since there wouldn’t be a piano there, he invited two musician friends, Henry Fleetwood Sheppard and Frederick Bussell to go out with him to make a note of the tunes while he wrote down the words. You can read more about Bussell and Sheppard on the page ‘Collecting Songs’.

He published a selection of these songs in his books ‘Songs of the West’ and ‘A Garland of Country Song’. He also wrote a number of articles about the songs which were published in various magazines. Uniquely, among collectors of his time, he gave a manuscript copy of the songs as he had collected them to Plymouth Library so that others could consult them.