Katie Howson – “A Dove Among a Flock of Old Crows: Women Traditional Musicians in England”
The Roy Palmer Lecture for 2026, the eleventh in the series, will be given by the musician, collector and scholar, Katie Howson as part of the Whitby Folk Week. It will take place in the Coliseum, Victoria Pl, Whitby YO21 1EZ on August 27th at 12 noon. Admission to the lecture is free of charge.
Katie’s talk will be a personal interrogation into why we know so little about female instrumentalists outside the folk revival. “Drawing on my experiences as both a practitioner and a researcher, I will range across England, look across the Irish Sea and the Atlantic, and even further afield, at women musicians whose music and stories have inspired me or piqued my curiosity. Alongside the personal anecdotes from collecting and playing music, and the stories of women whom I never met but who nevertheless influenced me as a musician, I will open up an examination and analysis of the factors contributing to our lack of knowledge of this subject.”
Katie Howson is a musician and writer, well known for championing the music, song and dance from the eastern counties of England. Parallel to this has been her dance band “career” where she has consistently investigated traditional music sources from further afield. In 2000, Katie founded the East Anglian Traditional Music Trust, from which she retired in 2017. In 2010 she was awarded the EFDSS Gold Badge Award. She is the author of several books including “Before the Night Was Out (traditional music from Suffolk and Norfolk)” and has recently created a website devoted to the history of the dulcimer in East Anglia, based largely on original research. A number of shorter research articles have been published on her other website Unsung Histories. Katie has given numerous talks at folk festivals including Whitby Folk Week, and for the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, the Traditional Song Forum, Instep Research Team and the International Dulcimer Congress. Most of her research focuses on microstudies of song, music and dance communities, and she welcomes this opportunity to examine a broader, and highly significant, issue which seems to have received surprisingly little attention.
http://www.unsunghistories.info
http://www.eastangliandulcimers.org.uk
http://www.katiehowson.co.uk
We are, once again, grateful to Whitby Folk Week for agreeing to host this talk and for their assistance with the arrangements
Details about previous lectures can be found on at https://roypalmerlecture.org/