Martin A new book, The Routledge Companion to English Folk Performance edited by Peter Harrop and Steve Roud, is to be published shortly. You can find more details HERE. It has to be admitted that the listed price is very high at £200, but if you must have it, they are currently offering it in their ‘Summer Sale’ at just £160. … Read more
Tom Pettitt has written with news of a great piece of work on murdered sweetheart ballads:‘I was wondering if the Newsletter might be an appropriate place to report that my work on the Murdered Sweetheart Ballads has provisionally culminated in a ca 300pp. ‘Internet Paper’, “The English Murdered Sweetheart Ballads: A Discursive Catalogue”, accessible online … Read more
Steve Roud recently discovered a rather wonderful collection called ‘An Album of Street Literature’ which is a selection of early Nineteenth Century broadsides from the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. You will find it on the Internet Archive – HERE. It isn’t indexed (though Steve is taking care of that) but the images … Read more
One of the reasons that I have been reaching up regularly for volumes of the Folk Music Journal and its predecessors from my shelves is that I have been giving a little help to John Francis of Albion Records, who is currently working on a new set of four CDs which will contain between them performances of … Read more
It is some while since we had any new articles submitted for the TSF Website so we are pleased that Lewis Jones, one of the people who have contributed in the past, has sent in an article about Lucy Broadwood and West Gallery Choirs which makes fascinating reading. You can find it on www.tradsong.org – go to … Read more
Some of you may have had the pleasure of meeting the American folklorist, collector and record producer, Kenneth Goldstein, as I did many years ago. While wandering the virtual world the other day I came across his collection of English, Irish and Scottish broadside ballads, which has been made available on the University of Missouri … Read more
A new project that I have been working on has led to me looking at the history of some lesser known songs. While many of these appeared on undated broadsides, I was struck by how often the Traditional Ballad Index directed me to the journals of the old whalers for the earliest confirmed date of … Read more
Amongst all the recent excitement I haven’t nominated a ‘Website of the Month’ for some weeks – so I’ll mention two.John Baxter, who has been assisting us technically with the Zoom meetings, has an excellent website which he describes as ‘a work in progress’, but is actually very useful. It is called Folk Song and Music … Read more
Nick Dow has written to tell me that a new selection of 100 songs from the Hammond and Gardiner manuscripts has now been published by Francis Boutle. It is called Southern Songster. Musical notation has been provided by Cohen Braithwaite Kilcoyne, and there are extensive song notes by Steve Gardham. There is also a small selection … Read more
Another TSF member, David Sutcliffe, has also been busy and has just launched his website, www.cecilsharpspeople.org.uk. You can also download David’s press release here, which will tell you how it came into being – go HERE. The site is about the people Sharp met and you can search to obtain a brief biography, often accompanied by a … Read more