HE KEEPS OLD TUNES ALIVE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 120, 10 October 1941, Page 13

HE KEEPS OLD TUNES ALIVE

Village Postman Who Gave Percy Grainger "‘Shepherd’s Hey’’

NE of the best known figures in the village of Ilmington, in the Cotswold Hills, is Samuel Bennett, the country fiddler and folk dancer from whom Percy Grainger got the tune of Shepherd’s Hey. A farmer turned village postman, Sam Bennett is widely known at country fairs throughout Warwickshire and Gloucestershire for his faithful playing of the folk songs of old England, especially those peculiar to the Shakespeare district in the 18th and 19th centuries. J.. Purser, of Upper Hutt, Wellington, is a lifelong friend of Sam Bennett, and in an illustrated talk which he will give from 1YA on Tuesday, October 14, he describes the district in which Sam Bennett lives, and tells how the latter came to learn the fiddle and how many, like Grainger, have come to hear him play. Sam was the second son of a farmer, and was reared on the land in one of the loveliest parts of England, but turned to the more humdrum job of postman as agriculture declined. Early in his youth, he learned to play a very old fiddle, and with his love of music

and keen ear, he picked up many folk songs and tunes angi kept them alive, little realising that one at least of them would be noted down and played by orchestras all over the world. A strong personality, Sam loved to dress in the Morris dancing garb when he was playing for village dancing. He played a full part in the simple life of his village, and although he is an old man now, he is, if anything, more than ever a celebrity in the Cotswolds.