(b Exeter, 28 Jan 1834; d Lewtrenchard, Devon, 2 Jan 1924). English clergyman, folksong collector, novelist and writer. He was educated at Cambridge (MA, 1856), ordained in 1864, and on his father’s death in 1872 he inherited the family estates at Lewtrenchard, where he became rector in 1881 and served as a Justice of the Peace. He travelled extensively and wrote voluminously on theological and general topics; he was also a pioneer in the collection of English folksong. Between 1888 and 1891 he published 110 examples, transcribed from performances by singers in Devon and Cornwall, as Songs and Ballads of the West. The collection was made jointly with the Rev. H.F. Sheppard, sub-dean of the Savoy Chapel, with whom Baring-Gould also collaborated to produce A Garland of Country Song (1895) and English Minstrelsie (1895–6). Their first joint publications in the field preceded by several years the folksong collections of W.A. Barrett, Frank Kidson, John Stokoe and J.A. Fuller Maitland, and were themselves preceded only by John and Lucy Broadwood’s Sussex Songs (1843, 1888). Cecil Sharp’s revision of Songs and Ballads of the West (1905) reflects the influence of Baring-Gould’s early work on Sharp’s own choice of location. Baring-Gould was the author of the words of many well-known hymns of which the most celebrated is Onward, Christian Soldiers, first published in the Church Times in 1865 and later popularized by Sullivan’s tune. Understandably less well known is the collection in which he deliberately imitated the idiom of Sankey and Moody, Church Songs (1884), also produced jointly with H.F. Sheppard.
G. Boyes: The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, 1993)
H. Orel, ed.: Gilbert and Sullivan: Interviews and Recollections (Basingstoke, 1994)
B. Pegg: Folk: a Portrait of English Traditional Music, Musicians and Customs (London, 1976)
BERNARR RAINBOW