Steve Roud in the chair, Richard SpencerDate: Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:01:13 PSTNext meeting will be 8 March. Further meetings have not had their dates set.Please check the TSF website for details of upcoming dates.In 2025 several TSF members gave online presentations to the American Folklore Society’s annualconference, which we co-sponsored. The core theme was … Read more
Season 5 of the podcast is being prepared, and will start on the 1st October.But before that there will be a live event on Saturday 27th September, at the Traditional Music Day in Stowmarket, Suffolk, doing the first ever episode in front of an audience.We’ll be covering Roud 164: John Barleycorn. Steve Roud will be providing … Read more
Broadside Day 2026 will be on 14th February at the University of Sheffield. Please save the date.
As well as the Roy Palmer Lecture the following talks and interviews during the week may be of interest.
Regular attendees of our Zoom meetings will be sorry to hear this news from Martin: Conrad Jay BladeyI have heard from Mary, the wife of TSF Colleague Conrad Bladey, that he passed away on 16 June following complications with Parkinson’s Disease. Conrad was a long-time member of TSF and, until recently, a regular attendee at … Read more
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
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
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