Janet Heatly Blunt
Janet Heatly Blunt
(1859-1950)
Janet Heatly Blunt Janet Heatley Blunt was born in India, the daughter of a Major General in the Royal Bengal Artillery stationed in the Punjab. After the death of her mother in 1892, her father retired from active service and brought his family back to England, becoming a lessee of Halle Place in West Adderbury, Oxfordshire. After her father died, Blunt, a spinster, became a benevolent 'lady of the manor', becoming very involved in running the estate and, through her contacts with the tenants and villagers, became interested in the traditions of the village, particularly the songs, morris dances and religious music which she collected between 1907 and 1931.
Initially interested because they were like the songs her father had known as a boy in Hampshire, Blunt was further inspired by the work of Cecil Sharp and others associated with the Folk-Song Society and English Folk Dance Society. She was also concerned that the old songs were dying out and she spent many hours with local singers, writing down the words and music she found. She invited singers into her home so she could use the piano to help notate the tunes accurately. One of her most important informants was a stonemason, shopkeeper and pub landlord, William 'Binx' Walton, who gave her the songs and dances of Adderbury Morris, of which he was the leader. These are significant in that the dances incorporated the songs. She also had a keen interest in Basque music and dance.
Although Blunt did not collect a huge amount of material (and the size of her collection is misleading in that a number of her notebooks are duplicates, all slightly different), her collection is particularly interesting to researchers because most of her singers lived within a few miles of each other. She noted down around 125 songs from 46 singers, mainly from or around Adderbury, while friends and fellow collectors sent her an additional 80 items. She contributed 14 songs to the journals of the Folk-Song Society.
Janet Blunt died on 4 August 1950.
There are 20 items in the Blunt collection, 3 of which have duplicates. It is worth looking at the duplicates, particularly of volume 17 where there is additional material. These reside at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML), London.
Browse Janet Blunt's collection in The Full English digital archive.
