ABSTRACT
Manuscript tunebooks, often known generically as Fiddlers’ Tunebooks, are handwritten manuscript books preserving remnants of a largely amateur, monophonic, instrumental practice. These sources are vastly under-explored academically, reflecting a wider omission in scholarship of instrumental music participated in by ‘ordinary’ people in nineteenth-century England. Currently, the tunebooks generate interest amongst folk music enthusiasts, and as such can be subject to a ‘burden of expectation’ in Steve Roud’s phrase, in the belief that they represent folk music tradition. Yet, the concepts of both tradition and folk music are problematic. However, the manuscripts provide an important and largely unexplored insight into the repertoire and life of vernacular nineteenth-century musicians and the wider context in which they are placed. In this chapter, I explore the tunebooks contents and compilers, taking a ‘who, what, when, why and how’ approach. The research is based on work carried out for my PhD thesis in which I looked at a wide range of tune manuscript books, but this chapter focusses specifically on one case-study tunebook compiled circa 1870 which belonged to Thomas Hampton from Hereford.
