Our Spring conference will be held at the Portico Library, Mosley Street, Manchester, on the 18th of April 2026. (https://www.theportico.org.uk/). A list of the presenters and their papers is given below. The programme in printable form is available at the foot of this page.
Entrance is free, but pre-registration is essential. To book places at the conference please complete this form
Women and Folk Song – the contribution of women to traditional folk song in Britain, Ireland, and elsewhere
Catherine Ann Cullen – ‘Look to her, gaoler’: Trials and troubles of women street singers in nineteenth century Ireland
Women were singing and selling ballads on the streets of nineteenth century Ireland, but few names have survived except in court reports. Like their male counterparts, they faced prosecution for sedition, obstructing the public way, begging and drunkenness. In addition, those who were mothers fell foul of the law for bringing their children with them onto the street, attracting charges of encouraging minors to beg; or leaving them at home, resulting in charges of neglect. When women street singers appear in reminiscences, they are usually anonymous, like Samuel Lover’s ‘female ballad hawker’ or ‘old dowager’. Some were called by nicknames, but unlike ‘Zozimus’, whose birth name of Michael Moran was generally known, the real names of ‘Ranting Sal’, ‘Warbling Biddy’ or ‘Limping Kitty’ have not thus far emerged. This paper will attempt to retrieve neglected women singers using newspapers, civil and church records, and memoirs. It will acknowledge the contribution to the canon of women such as blind Mary Madden of Limerick, a source of Irish-language songs for George Petrie’s Ancient Music of Ireland (1855). It will depict women ballad singers who fell foul of the courts, and those who suffered physically and mentally for their occupation. One such singer collapsed on a Dublin street in 1874: a doctor diagnosed epilepsy aggravated by the hardships endured by her poverty and itinerant life. At least two female ballad singers attempted suicide, one in a cell in County Down after being charged with drunkenness, and the other in a river in Cork. Newspaper columnists often decried the nuisance of women balladeers and called for them to be jailed. This paper will bring together a range of female street singers, and attempt to substantiate the scant details of their lives, performance styles and songs.
Catherine Ann Cullen is an award-winning Irish poet, children’s writer and songwriter. She was Poetry Ireland’s inaugural Poet in Residence from 2019 to 2021. She recently completed a Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship with University College Dublin and Poetry Ireland, and is finishing her first non-fiction book, on lost street poets and tenement balladeers of nineteenth-century Dublin. Her eighth book, a poetry collection entitled Storm Damage, was published by Dedalus Press in Dublin in October 2025. catherineanncullen.wordpress.com
Julia Bishop – Song, Sex and Family: Women, Illegitimacy and ‘The White Fisher’ (Child 264/Roud 3888)
‘The White Fisher’ (Child 264; Roud 3888) is a regionally localised ballad documented from a small number of Aberdeenshire singers, all but one (whose identity is unknown) being women. Preserved into the twentieth century by singers such as Bell Duncan, the ballad is exceptional in its treatment of rape, premarital pregnancy, illegitimacy, attempted infanticide, adoption, and the restoration of family order.
Earlier textual analysis of the extant versions has shown that they are remarkably stable for a comparatively long ballad with a complex narrative.[i] This paper examines the song in relation to women’s repertoires, aspects of singer biography, and the distinctive social history of a region characterised by high levels of illegitimacy and pragmatic attitudes towards its regularisation through marriage.
The child at the centre of the narrative is, however, illegitimate in more than one sense: conceived before marriage, fathered by a man other than the husband, and born into a marriage that cannot regularise his resulting status. The ballad is therefore not concerned with ordinary premarital pregnancy, but with the limits of marriage itself as a mechanism of legitimation. ‘The White Fisher’ imagines a morally acceptable resolution through concealment, compromise, and a strategic reworking of the sexual double standard in the woman’s favour, prioritising the welfare of the child over sexual blame. Read in this way, the song articulates a local moral economy of family responsibility that could in part explain its apparently restricted circulation and its persistence within women’s singing traditions.
Julia Bishop – I am an experienced researcher with an academic background in Folklore Studies and Music. My research focuses on children’s play and expressive culture. I also specialize in the study of traditional singing and vernacular music in Britain, Ireland and Newfoundland.
I joined the School of Education in 2009 as a Research Associate working with Professor Jackie Marsh on the AHRC-funded project ‘Children’s Playground Songs and Games in the New Media Age’. Since then, I have worked with a number of colleagues in the School of Education, and with Helen Woolley in the Department of Landscape, as a part-time researcher on numerous projects relating to children’s play and expressive culture.
My interests are broad in scope but they centre on school-aged children’s peer cultures, from contemporary and historical perspectives.
As a co-director of the British Academy Project Childhoods and Play: The Iona and Peter Opie Archive, I help to develop infrastructure, resources and new directions for research into children’s play and folklore, and promote public engagement with the Opies’ collection. I am also a member of the University’s newly established Contemporary Folklore Research Centre.
Elizabeth Bennett – Anne Geddes Gilchrist and the Women of the Weald
In this paper, I expand on my previous paper Women in the Margins, delivered at the 2025 Song and a Sense of Place conference, in which I argued for the illuminations that can be gained about women singing in the ‘first revival’ through attending to marginalia. This paper extends this argument and focuses solely on Anne Geddes Gilchrist, and her collecting activity in the Sussex Weald, with particular attention paid to women she collected from. I argue that through the notes she made in the margins of her manuscripts, we can gain valuable insights into the singing practices of these women, and that these are far from these being ‘superfluous’ as she worried.
Dr Elizabeth Bennett (she/her) is an interdisciplinary researcher and educator. In 2024, she published Performing Folk Songs: Affect, Landscape and Repertoire, the first full-length volume to explore English folk singing from the perspective of performance studies, engaging with debates on decolonization, feminism, and landscape. Her 2025 chapter for The Cambridge Companion to Folk Music, ‘Women in the Margins’, explores the significant contribution of women to the first folk song revival, and their subsequent marginalisation.
Mia Marta Ruus – Mai Kravtsov: Kuusalu’s great runosinger’s many faces in archives and research
Mai Kravtsov (1845–1933) is one of the most exemplary runosingers from the tradition’s period of decline at the turn of the 20th century. Her home parish of Kuusalu is one of the best documented in the Estonian Folkloristics Archives in the realm of folkloristic material, and she herself has enriched it with 300 runosongs along with many fairy tales, legends, folk religious practices and significant material on Coastal Estonian dialect rannakiel (coast language). Her cheerful and open personality up until old age inspired multiple fieldworkers over many decades to write down colourful descriptions of her person.
The following century of further studies and research has repeated and revised those impressions, creating a larger-than-life image of this great singer who in reality was also a mother (in law), grandmother, neighbour, community member and last teacher of a tradition destined to change along with a changing society. Who is the Mai Kravtsov that is revealed to us in different sources? What kind of knowledge stays in the communal memory long after a person’s actual life and who creates or curates this knowledge?
I am Mia Marta Ruus, an MA student in Tartu University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, studying folkloristics. I also work as a research and archive assistant in the Estonian Folkloristics Archive. I am specializing my studies and research on traditional Estonian folk singing, specifically the older, so called runo-style singing that is found amongst the Finnic peoples around the Baltic Sea. It is a tradition that, especially in the period when it began to be collected, was very woman-centric both thematically as well as women remaining as the main tradition-carriers.
Claire Rakich – “Rosemary, I need you!”: problematising gender motifs in the singing of folk songs in cinema.
Folk song has been used by British, Irish and American filmmakers throughout cinema history to heighten emotion, emphasise community and warn the powerful not to forget their roots. For many, film is where they first encounter folk song, and as such, it might be considered the greatest ambassador for the genre. But how have filmmakers historically used folk song? How do female characters perform compared to their male counterparts? And how problematic is this cinematic legacy? Using an interdisciplinary approach, referencing the work of folklorists, ethnomusicographers, composers and cinema writers, I analyse sixteen folk songs from fifteen films across multiple genres, from Gone to Earth (1950) to A Castle for Christmas (2021). For each song, I note the singer’s gender and status and the song’s narrative purpose.
My findings uncover ingrained problematic gender motifs which have endured for more than seventy years. For example, when an established female character sings an emotive folk song – film genre notwithstanding – she will invariably gain a man’s love or approval. Male performances are rarely, if ever, used in this way. Instead, these often take place during a crisis, the male character a conduit for a collective emotion. This poses a conundrum; as filmmaking becomes more inclusive and patriarchal norms continue to be questioned, is folk song on the silver screen in danger of becoming an obsolete trope? Or can we, by highlighting this cinematic legacy, help contemporary filmmakers to use folk song progressively and give both art forms the happy ending they deserve?
Writer, folklorist, singer and songwriter Claire Rakich is a recent graduate from the Folklore Studies MA at the University of Hertfordshire, for which, among other topics, she examined folk song in film, the origin of the Irish pub session in post-war London and Appalachian music’s role in the idealised concept of “real America”. A life-long lover of traditional music, she co-founded the Sark Folk Festival, which ran for nine years. Based in Brighton, she now performs with folk duo The Claras, performing traditional and original songs.
Hugh Miller – Why are there so few witches in traditional song?
The witch is a well-known folk figure, from the early modern period through to the 20th century, but apart from a few well-known examples, there are very few portrayals of witches in traditional ballads or broadsides. Those portrayals also often bear no resemblance to historical accounts of witch practices and accusations in early modern England. Some explanations for this discrepancy will be offered, and I will make a comparison with accounts of witches as they appear in folk tales. This raises the question of how the portrayal of women as witches in song reflects the reality of the wider society, and how transmission may have been influenced by changing understanding and attitudes about witchcraft.
Hugh Miller has been singing in local folk clubs for 60 years, on and off. He is an independent researcher after a career of teaching psychology, and social sciences in design, at Nottingham Trent University. Recently, he has been writing about the social processes involved in song collecting and about contemporary folk club repertoires.
Peter Snape – Anne Geddes Gilchrist – Let Us Remember the Women
Anne Geddes Gilchrist was a significant figure in the folk music collecting world, initially enjoying some success as a collector before becoming much more involved in the comparative study of song. She was the inspiration behind the direction taken by the editorial board of the Journal of the Folk Song Society (JFSS) and later the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (JEFDSS) to do just that.
Born and educated in Manchester, she was the first collector to be nationally recognised with a formal award, an OBE in 1948 for folksong and music and was the only collector who focussed on collecting material in the North West area. She was first and foremost an enthusiast and the conference would be an ideal opportunity for an appraisal of her life and the contribution she made to the collection and study of folk song. My presentation will focus on her as a folk song collector and historian and in keeping with the conference theme of women and folk song, include a perspective of her friendship with Lucy Broadwood with whom she corresponded and collaborated with over a number of years whilst both serving on the editorial board of the JFSS. I have chosen the title of my presentation as a ‘nod’ to the conference theme and one in which I will be able to include references to other female collectors and workers who form part of the Anne Gilchrist story.
Peter Snape is a life-long Lancastrian, rather like Anne Geddes Gilchrist. His interest in her song collecting began when searching for the long lost folk songs of Lancashire. This inevitably grew into a much wider research project and a number of the songs she collected have been recorded by the Gilchrist Collective who also celebrated her life and legacy in the folk music show ‘Most Truly Yours, Aunt Anne’.
Meg Hyland – Women and “The Ball o Kirriemuir” in the Herring Industry
“The Ball o Kirriemuir” is one of the most infamous folk songs in the Scots musical tradition. In this paper, I will analyse the testimony of George “Lordie” Hay, who sang a variant of the song for Hamish Henderson in 1952, now held in the School of Scottish Studies Archives. Hay learned the song from overhearing female herring gutters singing it while working in Banff during his childhood in 1888 or 1889. Hay’s testimony makes significant contributions to scholarly understandings of the early history of this ballad and, more broadly, to the use of bawdy Scots song among women workers.
Meg Hyland is a PhD candidate in Celtic and Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on the role of music in the lives of herring gutters in the Scottish fishing industry from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries.
Megan Wisdom -“Songs that my Mother Knew”: Women’s Voices from the John Howson Collection
In his introduction to Songs Sung in Suffolk, collector John Howson states his regret at not meeting more female musicians and singers; it was his belief that they were more difficult to find, as they sang mostly at home rather than in public. There are far fewer women than men in the Suffolk portion of his collection and several of them are speaking about a male relative. There are, however, a handful of female singers and musicians present who give a valuable insight into the amateur music-making of rural Suffolk.
As men have been collected from more than women, both in Suffolk and in general, accepted lines of transmission, song performance and even definitions of traditional songs themselves are arguably male biased, with female singers’ songs, experience and stories often left under-voiced. This paper will discuss the female singers of the Howson collection in order to bring to the fore their songs, experiences and perspectives. Using recorded interviews collected by Howson in the last quarter of the twentieth century, this paper will examine women’s songs; where they sung and how they learnt; their attitudes towards their own singing and that of others; and how this differs to that of Howson’s male informants, in order to explore their often-overlooked role as traditional music makers.
Megan Wisdom is an ethnomusicologist, folk singer, and musician born and bred in Suffolk, England. Specialising in oral history with a particular interest in the traditions of her home county, she graduated with First Class Honours from the Folk and Traditional Music BA at Newcastle University in 2022, and her debut book Handmade Music: Suffolk Voices from the John Howson Collection was published in 2024. She is the Editor of the traditional music, song and dance magazine Stepping It Out.
Martin Graebe – The Pioneer – Marianne Mason and Folk Song
Marianne Mason (1845-1932) described herself as a pioneer, and so she was, in many fields. She was the first woman to reach a senior position in the Civil Service with her work with disadvantaged children, she was also the first to conduct botanical studies in South Africa. Most interestingly for us she published the songs that she had collected in England and Wales in 1877, well in advance of the first ‘Folk Revival’. In this presentation Martin Graebe will describe her life and her work as a pioneer in folk song collection and her connection with Lucy Broadwood.
Martin Graebe is an independent researcher, writer, and singer, who has studied and written about many aspects of traditional song, with several scholarly articles published in Folk Music Journal. He has edited The Forgotten Songs of the Upper Thames: Folk Songs from the Alfred Williams Collection for the Ballad Partners. His book As I Walked Out: Sabine Baring-Gould and the Search for the Folk Songs of Devon and Cornwall (2017) received both the Folklore Society’s Katharine Briggs Award and the W. G. Hoskins Prize. He was the Secretary of the Traditional Song Forum from its inception in 1988 until December 2025. Martin and his wife, Shan, sing traditional songs together, with a repertoire based mainly on the traditional songs of southern England, and particularly those collected by Sabine Baring-Gould.