'This is a hugely intriguing, sensitively woven and at times unexpectedly moving book.'
Howard Goodall, author of THE STORY OF MUSIC

Winner of New Angle Prize 2023

Winner Historical Writers' Association Awards Non-Fiction 2023 

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In January 1905 the young Vaughan Williams, not yet one of England's most famous composers, visited King's Lynn, Norfolk, to find folk songs 'from the mouths of the singers'. He had started collecting in earnest little more than a year before but was now obsessed with saving these indigenous tunes before they were lost forever. An old fisherman, James 'Duggie' Carter, performed 'The Captain's Apprentice', a brutal tale of torture sung to the most beautiful tune the young composer had ever heard.

The Captain's Apprentice is the story of how this mysterious song 'opened the door to an entirely new world of melody, harmony and feeling' for Vaughan Williams. With this transformational moment at its heart, the book traces the contrasting lives of the well-to-do composer and a forgotten King's Lynn cabin boy who died at sea, and brings fresh perspectives on Edwardian folk-song collectors, the singers and their songs.

While exploring her own connections to folk song, via a Hebridean ancestor, a Scottish ballad learnt as a child and memories of family sing-songs, the author makes the unexpected discovery that Vaughan Williams has been a hidden influence on her musical life from the beginning - an experience she shares with generations of twentieth-century British schoolchildren.

The Captain's Apprentice: Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Story of a Folk Song was published by Chatto & Windus in 2022, the 150th anniversary of Vaughan Williams's birth.   

Publication dates: Hardback August 25th 2022; Paperback August 31 2023

Reviews

'This is a hugely intriguing, sensitively woven and at times unexpectedly moving book. What begins as an investigation into one English folk song and one twentieth-century English composer's interaction with it spirals outwards into a galaxy of related tales, discoveries, insights and surprises. It is written from the heart, an elegy to lost landscapes, to nearly forgotten communities and their cultural legacies, relived and newly honoured in the pages of this thoroughly absorbing book.'
Howard Goodall, author of THE STORY OF MUSIC

'A sadistic murder and the staggering words of a song drive Davison's obsession to unravel this vivid story of lives, landscapes and musical inspiration. No stone is left unturned in the meticulous gathering. Her gift is a work of love and infinite care.'
Keggie Carew, Costa Award-winning author of DADLAND

'Davison's evocative, far from linear approach does great service to the composer. Wandering wide, Davison's book is rich with the sense of context that has so often been stripped from the nation's memory sites. She has taken a risk in choosing a relatively narrow prism through which to view the composer, but this choice is what ultimately releases the book's wide array of colours. As such, The Captain's Apprentice meets the standards Vaughan Williams himself set in his obituary for his friend  the Folk-song collector Ella Mary Leather when he declared that a folklorist needs to be 'scientifically accurate, artistically imaginative and humanly sympathetic'.
LITERARY REVIEW

'Davison's animated, entertaining essay... is quietly sensitive to ironies and ambiguities without being pretentious, presenting a richly complex picture of a subject that can all too easily be shrouded in a sentimental haze'
THE TELEGRAPH

'The book makes for a quirky, fascinating read. Davison excels in evoking English landscapes, especially in Vaughan Williams's beloved fen country'.
THE SUNDAY TIMES

'The Captain's Apprentice explores a more profound and complex seam of folk discovery, and concentrates on a single life-changing episode in Vaughan Williams' life... [it is] well written and researched'.
FINANCIAL TIMES

'I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and its weaving of biography, social history and folk song.'
Steve Roud, author of FOLK SONG IN ENGLAND

'The Captain's Apprentice is a good read; more than that it is an important book. It might turn out to be the finest and most original book about Ralph Vaughan Williams to appear in 2022.'
John Francis , RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS SOCIETY JOURNAL

'...an immensely enjoyable, lively and thought-provoking read'.
Malcolm Taylor  FOLK MUSIC JOURNAL 

'Davison’s evocative and richly layered history weaves between the incredibly local and the global, crossing the waters from the past to the present. Centred on a dark and horrible tragedy, it’s the story of a folk song, but also much more than that. The Captain’s Apprentice melds many pasts, not least those of countless working-class men, women, and children, and their middle-class interlocutors, meanwhile asking us what it means to create and be creative, to seek to ‘preserve’, to try to ‘remember’, and to ‘forget’.” 

Jagjeet Lally, chair of judges for the HWA Award for Non-fiction 2023

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Blog

Caroline's blog on the first year of Vaughan Williams's listening journey into folk song - from the first song he collected in December 1903 (‘Bushes and Briars’) to the moment he heard ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’ in January 1905 - can be found here:

Ralph Vaughan Williams's Journey into Folk substack