Martin News of two new books from The Ballad Partners. First off the stocks is Vaughan Williams and Folk: 150th Anniversary Essays, Edited by Steve Roud and David Atkinson. A selection of essays celebrating Ralph Vaughan Williams’ lifelong involvement with folk song and music, as collector, editor, arranger, and composer. Many of them were first presented at the … Read more
This year’s Roy Palmer Lecture will be given by the American folklorist, Steve Winick, and is called ‘Lessons Learned from Robin Hood’. His talk will look at the question ‘what do the Robin Hood ballads communicate, and how can we help them keep communicating to today’s audiences?’ The lecture will be given at the Whitby … Read more
The live study day in Gloucester on Saturday 13 May was well attended and those who took part told us that they had enjoyed the event and found it useful. This was despite the train strikes which prevented some people attending, including our principal speaker, Steve Roud. Some hastily arranged technical work-arounds allowed him to … Read more
Another very successful year – and I think we can quietly congratulate ourselves on doing more than our bit at keeping the flag of traditional song research flying.In 2022 we mounted 15 online meetings, with over 40 presentations on an astonishing range of topics, and these are all available on our YouTube channel, which has … Read more
Jill Bennett and Elizabeth James have been studying the detail of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ visit to King’s Lynn in January 1905 for some years, and this book is the result of that work. The book is published in a large A4 format containing the songs collected on that visit as well as details of the … Read more
The latest volume from TSF’s companion organisation, The Ballad Partners, is a collection of 12 chapters, based on presentations given at Traditional Song Forum Zoom meetings over the past couple of years, and is a particularly strong set of papers, including topics from England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada and the USA. It is called Thirsty Work and … Read more
This year’s Roy Palmer lecture was given by Dr Julia Bishop at Whitby during the annual Folk Week. Her topic was ‘What shall we do with folk song music’. It was a fascinating talk with a live demonstration of folk song collecting using an interesting new piece of software for the iPad and a terrific … Read more
The full title of Caroline Davison’s new book is The Captain’s Apprentice, Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Story of a Folk Song and is a detailed account of the song. There is a lot of new information about Vaughan Williams’ visit to King’s Lynn, where he met the singer, Duggie Carter as well as ….. well, lots … Read more
Our conference at Limerick University, As I Roved Out, was a great occasion and some excellent papers were presented. It was wonderful to be out with colleagues and able to talk and sing together. The recordings of the papers from the conference will be sent out to conference delegates shortly and will be made available … Read more
The Ballad Partners have issued the third volume in their series on Cheap Print and Street Literature, based on papers presented at the annual BROADSIDE DAY conferences. The new title is A Notorious Chaunter in B Flat and Other Characters in Street Literature, edited by David Atkinson & Steve Roud (Pbk. 193pp., ISBN 978-1-9161424-4-2) £13 (plus … Read more