The International Journal of Traditional Arts

Editorial

Fay Hield, Esbjörn Wettermark, Kirsty Kay — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Experiences of accessing folk singing in England

Fay Hield, Esbjörn Wettermark, Kirsty Kay — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Folk singing in England today is dominated by people in a narrow demographic profile. Calls from within the folk scene for increased diversity have not yielded change. Existing literature suggests solutions from within the practice, but lacks insight into the perspectives of marginalised people and non-participants. Learning how to increase and diversify participation in folk singing is the [name redacted] project’s goal. Stage one sought to understand where we are now, through the eyes of participants and non-participants, to ascertain the adaptations needed to facilitate their involvement. We have engaged with over a thousand people through four data collection projects: a survey, extended focus groups, a peer interview scheme, and artistic research. These findings will be used in stage two to develop potential solutions. Despite a desire for inclusivity, barriers persist, including events tailored to specific preferences and a lack of knowledge from non-singers about the activities and from organisers about the needs of those they want to attract. While many people feel accepted, both insiders and outsiders view the folk scene as potentially unwelcoming or unsafe for certain groups, highlighting a contradiction between the desire for diversity and existing structural and ideological limitations. Recognising and addressing these factors will be crucial for increasing accessibility and diversity in folk singing activities.

‘I’d better not sing that here’

Paul Mansfield — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article focuses on how amateur folk singers approach performing in different live music settings, particularly those outside their regular and familiar environments. The paper incorporates personal experience, a small sample of interviews with local singers in the East Midlands of England and observational data. The interview responses indicate a range of strategies being employed by singers to balance their preferred repertoire choices – especially when the preference is for traditional song – with the circumstances of the specific event. This strategic thinking may, it is argued, reflect underlying issues about definitions of and assumptions about folk music as a genre. The discussion suggests that the situations that confront singers are complex, combining implicit stereotypes about what folk singers do (or should) sing and the multiple features that create the totality of the live music event for performers and audiences. It could, indeed, be held that relatively little about a performance event is controllable by the performer themselves. This is particularly relevant when a singer is performing in an unfamiliar place to an unfamiliar audience. Lastly, the paper proposes that, notwithstanding the challenges posed by different environments and audiences, the unclear boundaries of what constitutes folk music may provide positive opportunities for communities and performers to repurpose folk repertoire for their own objectives.

Embracing the Melange

Laura Midgley — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:09:46 +0000

The paper will draw on the concepts of Musicking, Imagined communities, Peircean Semiotics as discussed by Turino, and Bakthin’s critical theory to discuss English-medium folk music in a complex diasporic context in Athens, Greece. It will briefly relay the demographic profile of this diaspora and its music, and move on to explore how preexistent communities inform the music, and how the music feeds back into this cycle to create closer communal ties.

It will then explore the concept of authenticity and the subjectivity of experience, and why formulating thoughts about identity, community and music and the processes by which they come together is as much a personal exploration - a study of your own nature, as it is of the thing you’re trying to study.

It will conclude that bringing people together, evolving music together, understanding your own identity, and putting all of the above into writing are exploratory processes that echo and complement each other - a reflection of the inescapable state of flux which human beings and their musics are called upon to perform in.

What Are People Singing in Folk Song Clubs?

Hugh Miller — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:10:02 +0000

There is a long-standing debate over the nature and definition of ‘folk music’.The Victorian and Edwardian collectors have been criticised for filtering the repertoires of their sources to promote class-based ideas of ‘the folk’. This study proposes an alternative, behavioural, definition of folk music: that which is performed in folk music clubs. The music performed in two clubs in the East Midlands was recorded and categorised by authorship and date of composition. Sessions were noted at various times over the last four years, before, during and after the pandemic, giving a total of several hundred individual performances.The results show a very wide range of sources, dates, and kinds of music, with a very strong representation of post-World War 2 compositions, self-written songs, and importations from 20^th and 21^st-century popular culture, together with more ‘traditional’ material. Performers at the clubs sampled are mostly elderly and of lower middle-class background and these clubs may not continue in their present form for very long. Their repertoire is not representative of the whole of the current folk music world. These results are compared with some of the unfiltered accounts we do have of source singers’ repertoires, like a Copper Family songbook and Henry Burstow’s repertoire. It seems that the repertoires practically developed in the current folk club movement may be a modern equivalent of the full repertoires of earlier source singers, as suggested by writers like Harker and Cole. The processes of selection of vernacular music have repeated themselves. This leads to a suggested description of ‘folk music’ as practiced here, and a comparison between informal singing practices and Illich’s ideas of convivial activity.

Access Issues in English Folk Singing Styles and Techniques

Jessie Thompson — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:10:16 +0000

This article uses the conversations generated at an Access Folk Folk Singing Symposium event to identify accessibility questions caused by attitudes to vocal choices and habits in English folk singing today. The term accessibility is used to refer to the ease with which a singer can participate in English folk singing. Vocal styles and techniques are not generally understood to be access issues. In most genres, mastering technique is the domain of professional singers. English folk singing is rooted in non-professional community singing, and therefore the accessibility of stylistic vocal information is vital to encouraging participation, as a singer’s vocal choices and habits reinforce social connections to their communities (Diamond, 2011; Potter and Sorrell, 2012). The roundtable’s purpose was not to investigate whether English folk singing styles and techniques were helping or hindering participation but to begin a conversation about the process of folk singing and what experts’ opinions of these processes were, with the intention of identifying key vocal choices and habits commonly found in English folk singing.

Rolling On

Tony James Phillips — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:10:34 +0000

‘Rolling On’ is a national touring project looking at the health of sessions and singarounds throughout the UK. Starting in 2018, a small team from the weekly session at the Plough and Fleece community pub in Horningsea, Cambridge started to venture further afield to experience at first hand what was going on. The session host and present author, Tony Phillips had won a songwriting competition with Rolling On, telling the story of community singing in local pubs since the 1700’s, the period in which the Plough and Fleece was built. Members of the Plough and Fleece session group have subsequently visited 234 different sessions and singarounds as at August 2023 from the lowlands of Scotland to the south coast of England, collecting stories from attendees as they go, adding a selection of stories, videos and interviews to the website.

This paper identifies several key themes emerging from the project including discussions on the difference between performance and song-sharing, the role of hospitality, age and ethnicity; and the paradigm of an established tradition of folksong and the creation of an emerging tradition through the inclusion of new writing and contemporary song.

The projects methodology is rooted firmly in the participant-observer tradition with the addition of duly accredited data sources and self-submitted personal stories submitted to the website by session and singaround attendees.

Rosslyn Court in Margate

Christopher Butler, Morag Butler — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:10:45 +0000

Based on a presentation given at the 2023 Sheffield Singposium, this informal practitioner article describes the process of setting up a community folk venue in a deprived costal area of Kent. The demographic of the area is described together with the background of the founders. Initial business considerations are briefly recounted in the context of modern management theory. The process of linking with the local community is described, first in practical terms, then with reference to art-led regeneration theory. Initial steps and early contacts are described as well as how initial setbacks, such as the Covid pandemic, were managed. Reference is made to theories concerning the inclusion of the marginalised and then the article closes with a brief vignette of a relevant interaction recounted to the founders by Martin Carthy and memorialised in a Bob Dylan song.