The website for Dr Martin Shaw OBE FRCM (1875 –1958)

"...since Black Sir Hugo rode to the wood to pay the Devil his due."

The Accursed Wood

 

Sheet music fading out in a circle etc. with title etc. Instructions for playing are 'Allegro Moderato'

 

32: The Accursed Wood

Recording Artists: Iain Burnside & Andrew Kennedy

This is the second of Harold Boulton's poems set to music in this collection of Shaw's songs. The other is Over the Sea with the Soldier.
Shaw's dedication To my wife seems a little bizarre, until you take in the subject of the poem –which is about horse-riding.

Joan Cobbold had introduced him to riding in the early 1920s; it first appears as one of his ‘Recreations’ in Who’s Who in 1924. By 1927 Shaw was an accomplished rider, and in January of that year he spent two weeks in Suffolk riding with the Henham Hunt.

Around this time he was the proud owner of his own horse, stabled at Downshire Hill. It seems to have been sold after Shaw had a bad fall and broke his collar bone on Hampstead Heath, soon after this song was published.

 

 

AUTHOR PUBLISHER DATE SHEET MUSIC
Harold Boulton JB Cramer 1927 currently out of print