Here's Corpus Christ Carol - The Keeper Sung by John Goss Baritone from a rare 78 rpm shellac record released in the mid 1920s .
The Corpus Christi Carol or Falcon Carol[1] is a Middle or Early Modern English hymn (or carol), first written down by an apprentice grocer named Richard Hill around 1504.[2] The original writer of the carol remains anonymous. The earliest surviving record of the piece preserves only the lyrics and is untitled. It has survived in altered form in the folk tradition as the Christmas carol "Down In Yon Forest". The structure of the carol is six stanzas, each with rhyming couplets. The tense changes in the fourth stanza from past to present continuous.
While a number of different interpretations have been offered over time, Eamon Duffy writes that "there can be no question whatever" that the carol's "strange cluster of images" are derived "directly from the cult of the Easter sepulchre, with its Crucifix, Host, and embroidered hangings, and the watchers kneeling around it day and night."[3]
One theory about the meaning of the carol is that it is concerned with the legend of the Holy Grail. In Arthurian traditions of the Grail story, the Fisher King is the knight who is the Grail's protector, and whose legs are perpetually wounded.[4] When he is wounded his kingdom suffers and becomes a wasteland. This would explain the reference to "an orchard brown".
John Goss (1894-1953) was an English singer who revived interest in traditional folk music, which he orchestrated and sang in his beautiful baritone voice, and thus inspired people like Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger.
John Goss was born in Birmingham, England in 1894, the son of a labourer. He worked in a variety of factory jobs, and once led a protest of electrical apprentices. He might have spent his life on the shop-floor, but his fine singing won him a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, and by great perseverance he succeeded in building a career for himself; he spent some years studying in Germany, the musical centre at that time, and acquired a broad, humanitarian outlook.
His family was fiercely working class, and be had difficulty explaining his decision to go into something so refined as music. Thus he determined to devote himself to the revival of folk songs, the music of the people, and to perform these in the factories and union-halls, where working people tended to gather. He was a close friend of the composer Peter Warlock, and on good terms with Benjamin Britten.
After performing far and wide, he came to Canada around 1940; and started giving concerts in Vancouver then. He started a summer school of music on Galiano Island in 1947, at the property known as Lyons. This was at the same time that there was a thriving artistic scene at Arbutus Point Resort, frequented by painters like Molly Lamb Bobak and Jack Shadbolt, so the island must have been a hive of creativity. This was also about the time that Nigel Morgan, head of the B.C. Communist Party, established his Communist retreat and study centre near Retreat Cove.
John Goss, with his pacifist, working-class leanings was also suspected of being a communist. He addressed a peace conference in New York in 1949, in company with other musical figures like Aaron Copland, Dimitri Shostakovich, Paul Robeson, Benjamin Britten and many others. Just as the event was ending, he was approached by the police: they told him he could leave the country immediately or suffer the indignity of being deported.
He left the United States quietly but that was not the end of his problems. There was as much nastiness in Canada; the Vancouver Parks Board terminated his contract "in the interest of good public relations", and he had to close the summer-school on Galiano Island. Broken in health he returned to Birmingham, where he died in 1953.[1
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