Percy Manning (1870-1917)

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen’: songs, music and musical instruments in the Percy Manning collection, published in M Heaney (ed), Percy Manning: The Man Who Collected Oxfordshire. (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2017, pp. 221-255).

Percy Manning, Henry Balfour, Thomas Carter, and the Collecting of Traditional English Musical Instruments, published in Folk Music Journal (11.1:25-41, 2016).

Survival, Revival or Salvage? English Tradition and The Pitt Rivers Museum, MSc Dissertation.

Collecting music and song was an increasingly popular pastime for Victorians. Starting in 1893 with the Watford May song, Percy Manning collected a range of musical items: notated dance tunes, song lyrics, melodies and also musical instruments. Manning’s sources included printed journals, documents in the Bodleian Library, and correspondence with friends and acquaintances around England. He also collected items himself, and received regular reports from his agent Thomas Carter, among others.

Manning has been undervalued as a collector of music because his notebooks emphasise his interest in the customs, activities and folklore of which music formed an integral part, rather than in music and musical instruments per se. In fact, this makes his contribution all the more valuable as he provides a fuller ethnographic picture, giving contextual details and helping us to understand what the music he collected meant to the communities in which it was used.

Between them, these publications detail Manning’s music collections – the songs and tunes, the musical instruments and stories surrounding their use – and examine his influence and legacy as a collector of music and musical instruments.