Delius hit his stride as a composer around the turn of the twentieth century in such works as Mitternachtslied (1898) (a setting of the "Night Song" from Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra which he later incorporated into A Mass of Life); the tone poem Paris-The Song of a Great City (1899), and the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet (1900-1901). Those works and others, moreover, had been performed in Germany with marked success and established Delius' reputation on the continent, though little of his music had been heard in England.

In the spring of 1907, he was in London arranging for performances of his Piano Concerto and Appalachia. It may have been at the home of the painter John Singer Sargent that he met Percy Grainger, a kindred spirit in his inveterate roaming of Scandinavia, friendship with Grieg, and intense dislike of the conventional attitude which identified genuine music only with the German classical tradition. Grainger, meanwhile, had been assiduously collecting Scandinavian and English folk song, which he used as the basis of many of his compositions.

One of the pieces he showed Delius was a setting of "Brigg Fair" for tenor and a cappella chorus, the words and music of which Grainger had gleaned two years before from one Joseph Taylor, a Lincolnshire man in his early seventies. Not only was Delius much taken with the tune, but he recognized that he and Grainger also shared an affinity for a similar sort of post-Wagnerian, meltingly chromatic harmony. Sealing their friendship, which was to remain lifelong, Grainger gladly gave permission for Delius to use "Brigg Fair" as the basis of a large orchestral work.

Brigg Fair: An English Rhapsody was composed over the summer of 1907 and dedicated to Grainger; it received its first performance at Liverpool under Granville Bantock on January 18, 1908 (though the premiere has been widely and incorrectly ascribed to Hermann Suter at Basle the preceding year). Further performances followed quickly by Landon Ronald and the Hallé Orchestra in Birmingham on February 19 and Beecham with the New Symphony Orchestra in Queen's Hall, London, on March 31. For the latter occasion, Grainger brought Joseph Taylor to town to sit with him and Delius for the performance.

After the brief, atmospheric introduction, as the oboe introduces the theme, Taylor is said to have stood and sung the opening verse of "his" tune—"It was on the fifth of August, the weather fine and fair, /unto Brigg Fair I did repair, for love I was inclined...." In his little book on Delius, Philip Heseltine—known to all lovers of English song as Peter Warlock—notes that "he has, quite unconsciously, harked back to the very form in which the old English composers of the time of Queen Elizabeth were in the habit of adumbrating the popular melodies of the day—that is to say the cumulative variation form which afterwards grew formal in the passacaglia, in which the theme is repeated, intact or with very slight rhythmical modifications, in each variation, always surrounded with a new harmonic, contrapuntal, or rhythmic embroidery. In Delius' work there is a brief and lovely interlude—a kind of happy love-song, which is not derived from the main theme: otherwise the form is identical with that employed by John Bull, William Byrd, Giles Farnaby, and many another more than three hundred years ago."

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