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
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
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
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
Last November the Irish World Academy invited Steve Roud, Grace Toland and me to take part in a seminar about the use of archives in traditional song research. The video of that seminar has now been added to the TSF YouTube Channel and you can watch it HERE.
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
We will be holding our spring conference on 20th March 2027. This meeting is one of our regular ‘no theme’ conferences in which we welcome papers on any aspect of traditional song – including the songs themselves, the tunes, singers, collectors, and social contexts, as well as allied folk fields and other vernacular musics which … Read more