English Folk Song Suite - BHI6100328 | Music

Contents:
1. March - "Seventeen Come Sunday"
2. Intermezzo - "My Bonny Boy"
3. March - "Folk Songs from Summerset"

The “English Folk Song Suite” from 1923 is one of the best-known compositions by the Englishman Ralph Vaughan Williams, originally composed for an English military band under the title “Folk Song Suite”. The suite initially consisted of four movements. The actual second movement “Sea Songs” was removed from the suite by Vaughan Williams himself after the premiere and published as an independent work. The march "Seventeen Come Sunday" is an English folk song, also known in an early version as "Maid and the Soldier." The text is about a soldier who woos a young girl who turns 17 the following Sunday. “My Bonny Boy,” the folk song in the second movement “Intermezzo,” is about a girl very much in love who catches her lover in the arms of another woman and sings about her broken heart. The third movement, “Folk Songs from Somerset,” contains four folk songs: “Blow Away the Morning Dew,” “High Germany,” “Whistle, Daughter, Whistle,” and “John Barleycorn,” which Vaughan Williams artfully composes into a three-part march in A-B-A- Shape processed.