BUSHES AND BRIARS
Created on 13/12/2023Latest update on 10/11/2025
Artist: Mrs. Humphreys
Author: traditional
Label: EFDSS
Year: 1903
Roud #1027. One of the earliest, maybe even the very first recording made by Ralph Vaughan Williams (with phonograph in Essex), released in 1998 by the English Folk Dance and Song Society on anthology A Century Of Song, along with four other recordings made in the early 1900s. Bushes And Briars was for Vaughan Williams what The Seeds Of Love was for Cecil Sharp: the first song they collected and both in the same year (1903).
Covers:
- 1907:
George Dowder [Henry Hammond recording in Dorset]
- 1959:
- 1966:
Isla Cameron [and in '67 in film Far From The Madding Crowd; that recording came out in '87 on BBC album Through Bushes And Briars]
- 1970:
- 1974:
- 1978:
Barry Skinner [title track LP]
- 1978:
Barry Dransfield [in medley with a very similar Swedish air]
- 1991:
Swingle Singers [a cappella]
- 1993:
Eliza Carthy & Nancy Kerr [follow another Vaughan Williams notation]
- 1998:
- 2005:
- 2011:
Sarah Calderwood [with the Melbourne Symphony Orch.]
- 2024:
Not to be confused with the eponymous Sandy Denny song from her album Sandy (Island - '72).
