The 2021 Roy Palmer Lecture will be given by Jeremy Harte on 2 November as a live event at the Conway Hall in London, organised in association with the Folklore Society. The title of Jeremy’s talk, which was originally scheduled to be delivered in 2020, is ‘Brother Workmen: Solidarity in Trade Folklore’. Jeremy’s description of … Read more
The Folk Song Subject Index on the VWML website has just announced that the team on indexers have now added 1000 titles to the database – an important milestone. You can read a little piece in celebration HERE. But, if you haven’t tried using the index yet, do have a go with the whole thing HERE where all … Read more
Julia Bishop has written to share information about a project that she is involved in – ‘A National Observatory of Children’s Play Experiences During COVID-19’, about materials available online and opportunities for participation. Dear Colleagues and Friends,We are excited to announce the availability of our resource packs for the Play Observatory. As you may recall from … Read more
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