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
When I was traveling in Iceland in June (leading a party of Baring-Gould enthusiasts who wanted to follow the journey he made in 1862) we visited Siglufjordur, in the north of the country. Towards the end of our time in the town we discovered the Folk Music Centre – a permanent museum of Icelandic folk … Read more
Carolyn Robson sent me this brief report on the ‘Full English’ educational programme that she thought you might like to hear about: ‘The Full English is possibly the most exciting and significant thing to happen to British folk music in at least a generation…It is the creation of the largest searchable digital archive of early … Read more
We greatly enjoyed the TSF meeting hosted by ITMA in Dublin a couple of years ago and would like to congratulate them on having reached their 25th anniversary. If you have not visited their website (www.itma.ie) recently you will be delighted to discover how it has grown, with a large quantity of important recordings, videos … Read more
The greater part of Sabine Baring-Gould’s personal library was lent to the National Trust to fill the empty shelves at Killerton House, near Exeter, in the early 1970s and, after 40 years, the Trust has requested the Baring-Gould family to take the books away, so that they can create a new library, more closely linked … Read more
A group associated with the Gloucestershire folk music enthusiasts, GlosFolk have launched a new site of folksongs and related activity collected in Gloucestershire. It is at www.gloschristmas.com. This modest site is a Christmas pilot and a launch-pad for a bigger effort next year when they hope to put as many songs from Gloucestershire as possible … Read more