In the same years (1905-06) that Bartók and Kodály began roaming the Hungarian and Transylvanian countryside in search of a genuine Magyar heritage of folk song, Percy Grainger was similarly engaged in the English and Scandinavian hinterlands. He met Grieg—much of whose work may be said to valorize Norwegian folk songs—in 1906, while the previous year he had begun to rummage through Lincolnshire, seeking out folk singers and painstakingly transcribing their art. In this, he was at odds with other collectors, such as Cecil Sharp and the young Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose transcriptions of folk songs aimed at offering the urban public definitive versions that could be repeated strophically—folk songs in the abstract—where Grainger sought to capture the endless, peculiar variations his singers brought to a given melody. In a preface to Lincolnshire Posy, Grainger noted, "No concert singer I have ever heard approached these rural warblers in variety of tone-quality, range of dynamics, rhythmic resourcefulness and individuality of style...our folksingers were lords of their own domain—were at once performers and creators. For they bent all the songs to suit their personal artistic tastes and personal vocal resources...." When Grainger was commissioned in 1937 by the American Bandmasters' Association to compose a piece for that year's convention in Milwaukee, it is hardly surprising to find him, by then long an American citizen ensconced in White Plains, NY, looking back and rendering a loving tribute to the era in which he was in closest touch with the song of the earth. Of the six parts making his "bunch of musical wildflowers," Grainger wrote, "Each number is intended to be a kind of musical portrait of the singer who sang its underlying melody...a musical portrait of the singer's personality no less than of his habits of song...." The upshot is not folk song "arrangements," but small tone poems, evocations at once modally archaic and briskly modern, ranging from the laconic fanfare of Lisbon (Dublin Bay) through the noble poignance of Horkstow Grange, the eerie drama of Rufford Park Poachers, to the blithe insouciance of The Brisk Young Sailor, the volatile narrative grandeur of Lord Melbourne, and the dancing tumult of The Lost Lady Found. The Grainger-led premiere of Lincolnshire Posy was given by the American Bandmasters' Association on March 7, 1937, and has come to be regarded as his finest work.

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