Ballad Partners are delighted to announce our newest book, Collectomania! Revisiting the Folk Song Collectors. This collection includes ten papers from the major Collectomania conference organised by the Traditional Song Forum and the English Folk Dance and Song Society, held in London in 2024. It includes the keynote papers from Brian Peters on Cecil Sharp and … Read more
This year’s Roy Palmer Lecture will be given by the well-known folk performer, Jon Boden. The title of Jon’s talk will be ‘The Folk Revival – a view from the middle’. In it he will reflect on the ups and downs of an extraordinary cultural movement and make the case for optimism with the green … Read more
TSF Spring Conference, ‘Song and a Sense of Place’ The TSF Spring Conference was held at the University of Sheffield on 26 April 2025 with the support of the Contemporary Folklore Research Centre. This was an in-person event, though three of the presentations had been recorded beforehand. More than forty people booked places and it … Read more
David Murphy posted in Tradsong: I’d like announce that, through the supreme efforts of Dr Virginia Blankenhorn, editor, and Edinburgh Diamond, all issues of Scottish Studies are up on its website; the range covers volume 1, (1957) through 42 (2025).Scottish Studies is a journal which accepts scholarly contributions and work done through the University of … Read more
The EFDSS has announced a new series of library courses. The first course will be given by Steve Roud, presenting ‘Folk Song in England’: a six-week online evening course on the social history of traditional song and singing in England up to about 1950 (when the post-war Folk Revival changed things dramatically) The sessions will … Read more
Elizabeth Bennett has published a new book: Performing Folk Songs Affect, Landscape and Repertoire (Bloomsbury). It is, she says, the first full-length volume to explore English folk singing from the perspective of performance studies. Using archival sources, family repertoire and recorded performances of interviewees, this book argues that archives and repertoires are produced in sensory environments and … Read more
The video of this year’s Roy Palmer Lecture, given by Dr Margaret Bennet, is now available on YouTube – https://youtu.be/EeSbJ11YOBI. The title of Margaret’s lecture was ‘Seasonal Customs Outside Our Borders’. It was a very lively and enjoyable talk and definitely not one to miss. The lecture took place at the Whitby Folk Week in August … Read more
Matt Quinn has just launched a second series of the ‘In the Roud’ podcast in which he will be looking at Roud Numbers 11 to 20, starting with ‘The Baffled Knight’, for which the ‘Historical Guest’ is Steve Roud and the ‘Singer Guest’ is Vic Gammon. Search for the podcast on your usual provider. Matt … Read more
The fourth volume in the series of essays on street literature and cheap print will be available from October 2024, entitled Father Christmas and the Deck of Cards: Further Adventures in Cheap Print, edited by David Atkinson and Steve Roud. It is a collection of eleven essays based on papers presented at the Traditional Song Forum’s … Read more
It is a matter of great concern to us that we are finding it very difficult to get people to volunteer presentations for our meetings. We have been enormously successful in providing a platform for people to talk about their interests in folk song, as our back-catalogue and our videos on YouTube testify. Though some … Read more