Read an Excerpt
‘They went arm in arm along the road ’til they came to a stream,
And they both sat down together, love, to hear the nightingale sing.’
– The Bold Grenadier
The best singers are not always who we expect them to be.
Framed by golden fields, conversation spills from the village pub into the evening silence: stories, jokes, raucous laughter, and intense debate about the weather—which is never small talk for a farmer. Clay pipes lie on the counter, taken up one by one, and muddy hobnail boots lean steaming into a glowing brick hearth.
A weathered man sits in the corner, glass in hand, blending into the scene. Wrinkled. Worn. Bent almost double from decades of working outdoors, his brow as furrowed as the fields he once ploughed. He stands up slowly, steadies himself with a wooden stick and clears his throat. A howl from behind the bar calls for a hush:
“The singer’s on his feet!”
Through windows ajar, a nightingale’s mellifluous trill sounds above the lull and, looking up towards the ceiling, the man lets fly:
Green Bushes (verses 1 to 3)
As I was a-walking one morning in Spring
To hear the birds whistle and the nightingales sing
I met a young damsel and sweetly sang she,
“Down by the green bushes where he thinks to meet me.”
“I’ll buy you fine beavers and a fine silken gown
I’ll buy you fine petticoats, flounced down to the ground
If you will prove loyal and constant to me;
Forsake your own true love and marry with thee.”
“I want none of your beavers, nor none of your hose,
Do you think I’m so poor I would marry for clothes?
But if you’ll prove constant and true unto me, I’ll forsake my own true love and marry with thee.”
Right up to the close of the nineteenth century, such tender traditional songs as
Green Bushes were sung regularly by countrymen and women in the fields, cottages and local pubs of Britain. Songs without known origin, passed down orally from parents and grandparents, telling musical tales that span the full spectrum of human emotion and experience. Singing folk songs was a cornerstone of village culture and identity.
At first glance, nightingales look as modest as a humble farm labourer. Medium- sized and plain brown, wing feathers ribbed like a corduroy jacket, hiding themselves within impenetrable bush and thicket, they’re similar in many ways to their fellow scrub-dwellers. But the moment they open their beaks, the world lights up with an unparalleled majesty of sound. It is often said that to truly know a person you must first hear their voice, and this applies to birds, too.
According to folk songs, the nightingale sings while small birds merely whistle. Their fiery song has elevated them so that they star disproportionately in our own songs. The Roud Folk Song Index, compiled by folklorist Steve Roud, is a database with records of almost every folk song in the English language; if it has been scribbled down, recorded, printed or published, it is probably in there. The index lists 570 songs with ‘Nightingale’ in the title (although some of these refer to the name of a ship), second only to the blackbird with 611. Green Bushes is Roud #1040 in the index.
In the song itself, the woman is content to steal away from under the ‘green bushes’ with another, more rousing, suitor. This seems harsh and reckless, but the behaviour is no different from that of the fiercely competitive nightingale. Unpaired males sing through the day to defend their territory and through the night in their attempts to seduce a female. Their nocturnal singing habit is preserved in their Old English name, nigtegale, which translates to ‘night songster’. Was this duality in human and bird courtship intentionally highlighted by the inclusion of the nightingale? We can never know for sure.
