(b Leeds, 15 Nov 1855; d Leeds, 7 Nov 1926). English musical antiquary and folksong collector. Although of the school of William Chappell, he differed from it in accepting the validity of the oral tradition of folksong. He was a founder member of the Folk-Song Society in 1898 and one of the editors of its early journals; in 1906 he also contributed 30 songs and folk tales which he had himself collected in Yorkshire. Moreover, he anticipated Cecil Sharp’s rediscovery of the English folkdance tradition, for as early as 1890 he published a volume, Old English Country Dances (tunes only), and in 1915 he wrote, in association with Mary Neal, English Folk Song and Dance. He was also an accomplished amateur painter and expert on old Leeds pottery – on which, with his brother, he wrote the standard book, Historical Notes of the Leeds Old Pottery (1892). He contributed about 400 articles on a wide variety of subjects to Grove 2–4. His outstanding achievement, an index of English songs, running to 100,000 entries, was never published but is now in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, which also holds his collection of about 9000 volumes of folksong, 18th-century popular music, books and manuscripts. He published a valuable catalogue of British music publishers and engravers, and also several volumes of folksongs, of which the most important are Songs of Britain with piano accompaniments by Martin Shaw and A Garland of English Folk-songs and English Peasant Songs, both with accompaniments by Alfred Moffat. Leeds University gave him an honorary MA in 1923. The bulk of his library remains unstudied and the extent of his contribution to folksong scholarship has yet to be evaluated.
Old English Country Dances Gathered from Scarce Printed Collections and from Manuscripts (London, 1890)Traditional Tunes: a Collection of Ballad Airs, chiefly obtained in Yorkshire and the South of Scotland (Oxford, 1891/R)The Minstrelsy of England: a Collection of 200 English Songs … popular from the 16th Century to the middle of the 18th Century (London, 1901)75 British Nursery Rhymes (London, 1904)Children’s Songs of Long Ago (London, 1905)The Golden Wedding: a Yorkshire Idyl (London, 1910)English Songs of the Georgian Period (London and Glasgow, 1911)Dances of the Olden Time (London and Glasgow, 1912)Songs of Britain (London and New York, 1913)English Country Dances arranged for Children’s Performance (London, 1914)Old English Country Dance Tunes (London, 1915)100 Singing Games, Old, New, and Adapted (London and Glasgow, 1916)A Garland of English Folk-Songs (London, 1926; 16 songs rev. E. Poston, 1968)Folk Songs of the North Countrie with their Traditional Airs (London, 1927)English Peasant Songs with their Traditional Airs (London, 1929)The Minstrelsy of Childhood (n.p., n.d.)Old Country Dance and Morris Tunes (London, n.d.)
‘New Lights upon Old Tunes’, MT, xxxv–viii (1894–7) [ser. of 8 articles]
British Music Publishers, Printers and Engravers, London, Provincial, Scottish, and Irish, from Queen Elizabeth’s Reign to George the Fourth’s (London, 1900/R)
English Folk-Songs Some Conclusions (London, 1907)
‘Some Illustrated Music-Books of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: English’, MA, iii (1911–12), 195–208
‘A Study of Old English Song and Popular Melody prior to the Nineteenth Century’, MQ, i (1915), 569–82
with M. Neal: English Folk-Song and Dance (Cambridge, 1915/R)
‘John Playford and Seventeenth-Century Music Publishing’, MQ, iv (1918), 516–34
The Beggar’s Opera: its Predecessors and Successors (Cambridge, 1922/R)
‘Handel’s Publisher, John Walsh, his Contemporaries and Successors’, MQ, vi (1920), 430–50
L. Broadwood: Obituary, MT, lxviii (1927), 42–3
L. Broadwood and others: ‘Portrait of Frank Kidson by Some of His Friends’, JEFDSS, v (1946–8), 127–35
H.G. Farmer: ‘The Kidson Collection’, The Consort, no.7 (1950), 12–17
A.E. Green: Foreward to F. Kidson: Traditional Tunes (Wakefield, 1970)
F. Howes: Folk Music of Britain – and Beyond (London, 1970/R)
R. Palmer: A Checklist of Manuscript Songs and Tunes Collected from Oral Tradition by Frank Kidson (London, 1986)
R. Palmer: ‘Kidson's Collecting’, Folk Music Journal, v (1986), 150–75
HERBERT THOMPSON, WILLIAM C. SMITH/FRANK HOWES/ROSEMARY WILLIAMSON