Mary Humphreys and Anahata

This compilation of songs from Cambridgeshire is the result of many years of painstaking research into long-forgotten manuscripts in the British Library and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House.

Mary has lived in Cambridgeshire for nearly ten years and as she likes to song songs from her neighbourhood was disappointed to find none in circulation. Having resolved to find whatever local material was available she discovered a rich seam of songs that had almost entirely been forgotten for a century.

Several of the songs in this book were collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp, both Cambridge graduates themselves. Most of the others were collected by a remarkable young woman, Ella Bull, a native of the Fen Edge village of Cottenham only 6 miles from the centre of Cambridge. Ella was blind from birth but had a very supportive family who aided here in her mission to collect as many songs as possible from her acquaintances with a view to getting them published. Sadly this never happened in her lifetime, but perhaps this book will go some way to righting that wrong.

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