English Village Carols

English Village Carols

English village carols (also known as Sheffield carols) are a tradition of Christmas carol-singing from Derbyshire and South Yorkshire, traditionally sung in small village pubs in the leadup to Christmas. The condensed history is that basically every small village had its own oral tradition of sung church music until the introduction of standard hymnals in the early 19th century, at which point non-standard singing was banished from local churches. In some cases this led to music dying out, while in others the musical traditions found new homes outside of organised religion: in this case, singing over pints of beer in the local pub. The tradition continues to this day.

To hear examples of pub singings see here; for more information on the carols as a living tradition see here.

Sydney Village Carols

I became interested in this music in 2016 and was fortunate enough to be in Sheffield that year and able to join some of the pub singings. After returning to Australia and finding some locals that also had a love of and connection to this singing, we decided to try bringing the music to Sydney. The problem was, only two of us knew the songs and the only sheet music we had access to were a few hardback copies of Ian Russell’s book of Sheffield carols. This book is a great scholarly resource but not ideal for singing from directly.

I decided that the best option was to use the existing music arrangements but to re-set the sheet music in a more condensed form. To do this I photocopied the music books, OCRed the image files with SharpEye, cleaned up the imperfect OCR MuseXML files manually where needed, and re-set the music for each song in a more condensed form with Lilypond. Finally, I used LaTeX to build all the separate music files into a single songbook document with indexing and hyperlinks, which we’ve used to sing from since.

The songbook project is documented and accessible on Gitlab here and the compiled PDF of the re-set sheet music is here.

EDIT: as of November 2022, I’ve moved this project to GitHub and source files + compiled PDFs can now be found here.