The latest volume from TSF’s companion organisation, The Ballad Partners, is a collection of 12 chapters, based on presentations given at Traditional Song Forum Zoom meetings over the past couple of years, and is a particularly strong set of papers, including topics from England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada and the USA. It is called Thirsty Work and Other Legacies of Folk Song, and is edited by Steve Roud and David Atkinson. Retail price is £13 (plus postage and packing) and it is available from The Ballad Partners website – https://www.theballadpartners.co.uk/publications (overseas customers please email to check postage before ordering). The papers included in the book are:
Katie Howson – Thirsty Work: Traditional Singing on BBC Radio, 1940–41
Eileen Richardson – From Tyneside to Wearside: In Search of Sunderland Songs
Elaine Bradtke -Sam Bennett’s Songs
Anna Kearney Guigné – Newman and Company of Dartmouth and the Song Tradition of Newfoundland’s South Coast
Colin Bargery – Railwaymen’s Charity Concerts, 1888–89
Patience Young – Picturing Protest: Prints to Accompany Political Songs
Keith Gregson – That is all the explanation I am at liberty to give in print’: Richard Runciman Terry and Songs from the Sea.
Eleanor Rodes – Drawing from the Well: Emma Dusenbury and her Old Songs of the Ozarks
Karen E. McAulay – Alexander Campbell’s Song Collecting Tour: ‘The Classic Ground of our Celtic Homer’
Margaret Bennett – ‘Don’t let us be strangers’: William Montgomerie’s Fieldwork Recordings of Scottish Farmworkers, 1952.
Thérèse McIntyre – ‘No Maid in History’s Pages’: The Female Rebel Hero in the Irish Ballad Tradition
David Atkinson – Who Is Speaking in Songs?