Frank Kidson
Frank Kidson
(1855-1926)
Frank Kidson was born on 15 November 1855 in Leeds, youngest of the nine children of Francis Prince Kidson - butcher turned lamp-rate collector - and his wife Mary, the daughter of a factory owner. Frank received, in his own words, ‘a limited education’ as a boarder at ‘a somewhat rough local school’, but he read voraciously in his father's large library.
His interest in music came from his mother’s singing and his growing interest as an antiquarian. He haunted salerooms, shops, and street stalls in search of books and manuscripts. Primed with extensive knowledge taken from his material and from other library collections libraries, in 1886 Frank Kidson embarked on a series of articles for the Leeds Mercury, dealing with the antecedents of a wide range of songs. He went on to write on the history of song and dance, both traditional and composed, printed and oral, which he contributed to newspapers and periodicals. He supplied 365 entries for Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd edn, 1904–10), and his skill in unravelling a song's pedigree caused his friends to dub him ‘the musical Sherlock Holmes’.
His reputation and generosity with his material granted him respect from other song-seekers and he joined the committee of the English Folk-Song Society on its inception in 1898. In 1900 he published British Music Publishers, a consequence of his research into the history of published music. Although he appreciated song collection from oral sources, Frank was an empiricist who preferred tracing traditional material through printed text.
Frank died on 7 November 1926 at his home in Chapeltown, Leeds. Some twenty years after his death a friend wrote that he had ‘lived to be obscured where once he had been considered foremost in authority’ but a new wave of interest in traditional song, starting in the 1960s, led to the rediscovery of his collection, the reprinting of some of his books, performances at concerts and on record of songs he had noted.
The Kidson folk song manuscripts are currently housed at Mitchell Library, Glasgow. They cover the period 1886-1920s and the principal geographical coverage is Yorkshire.
Browse Frank Kidson's collection in The Full English digital archive.
