Lucy Broadwood

Lucy Etheldred Broadwood (9 August 1858 – 22 August 1929) was an English folksong collector and researcher during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As one of the founder members of the Folk-Song Society and Editor of the Folk Song Journal, she was one of the main influences of the English folk revival of that period. She was an accomplished singer, composer, piano accompanist, and amateur poet. She was much sought after as a song and choral singing adjudicator at music festivals throughout England, and was also one of the founders of the Leith Hill Music Festival in Surrey.

She was born at 2am on 9 August 1858, at the Pavilion, the summer residence that her father rented at Melrose in Scotland, the daughter of the piano manufacturer Henry Fowler Broadwood () (1811–1893) (eldest son of James Shudi Broadwood) and his wife Juliana Maria, and great granddaughter of John Broadwood, the founder of Broadwood and Sons, piano manufacturers. She was the youngest of eleven children (two boys and nine girls). Henry's mother was of Scottish descent and from her he had learnt the ballad "The wee little croodin' doo", which he would sing to the young Lucy. She recalled later: "The first musical impression that I ever remember came from this song, sung by my father as I sat astride his knee when little more than two years old and in our Tweedale home."

For a number of years the family maintained a home in London, where the Broadwood piano manufacturing factory was situated. In 1864, however, following the death of Lucy's uncle the Rev. John Broadwood (1798–1864) the family moved to Lyne House, in the parish of Capel in Surrey, just across the county border from the Sussex village of Rusper.

John Broadwood had been responsible in 1847 for self-publishing what is now recognised as the first true collection of English folk songs (comprising both words and music as collected from "rustics" in Surrey and Sussex). Other works had appeared before, but none married actual words and music as collected together. The work, which is more commonly known today by the shortened title Old English Songs, comprised a small number of songs which Broadwood had personally collected and noted down, and which were provided with arrangements by W.A. Dusart, an organist from Worthing, a few years before publication.

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