Reissuing works originally published between 1968 and 1995, this fascinating collection of books on song and culture and folk music more widely is a superb resource in cultural studies, history and music in one place. Some works look at the contribution of an individual to the understanding of folk singing, or the songs and stories from one region, while others take a wider look at the spread within the Anglo-American folk music sphere. Nearly all books contain tunes and lyrics related to their topics and between them present a great display of the scholarship in this deeply interesting...

Originally published in 1995. This book s collection of key essays presents a coherent overview of touchstone statements and issues in the study of Anglo-American popular ballad traditions and suggests ways this panoramic view affords us a look at Euro-American scholarship s questions, concerns and methods. The study of ballads in English began early in the eighteenth century with Joseph Addison s discussions which marked the onset of an aesthetic and scholarly interest in popular traditions. Therefore the collection begins with him and then chronologically includes scholars whose views...

Originally published in 1980. Song is perhaps the strongest form of traditional culture. Its vigour and energy represent the power of the community from which it springs. This book focuses on traditional singing in two small English villages. It studies in detail an activity which goes to the core of the communal life in any village and demonstrates how song becomes the lifeblood of the traditions of rural life.

In many ways traditional singing is highly subversive because its practice is an affirmation of community and a denial of the fragmentation of modern society. The songs sung,...

Originally published in 1983. Song has always been a natural way to record everyday experiences an expression of celebration, commiseration, complaint and protest. This innovative book is a study of popular and working-class song combining several approaches to the subject. It is a history of working-class song in Britain which concentrates not simply on the songs and the singers but attempts to locate such song in its cultural context and apply principles of literary criticism to this essentially oral medium. It triggered controversy: some critics castigated its Marxist approach, others...

Originally published in 1968. The author, a well-known contemporary and friend of folklorist Katharine M. Briggs, collected a tremendous store of folk music material over many years and eventually decided to put some of it on permanent record. This book comprises a cross-section of rescued melodies dating back to medieval days and up to the Victorian early ballads. It describes individual folk singers in Somerset in great detail as personal accounts and documents their lyrics and their tunes, which are all together at the end of the volume.

Originally published in 1982. The songs on which this study is based were once vibrant in the throats and ears and minds of living people. This book examines the songs and their meanings in relation to the lives of those people, and relates them to the cultural tradition and practice of which they were an integral part. The art of village song represents a sense of cohesiveness and mutual identity around local patterns of kinship, social groupings, territorial orientations and cultural relationships. The actual ways in which songs were part of village life is of course highly problematic,...

Originally published in 1987. In this book we find songs reflecting every aspect of life in the twentieth-century Royal Navy, both upper and lower deck: war, ship s routine, aviation, submarines, the antics of dockyard personnel, not to mention the matelot s shore-going adventures, both amorous and bibulous.

The compiler was well-known as a folk-singer, though he began his career in the Royal Navy. Based on his personal collection of Navy songs, this book proves that the sailor s muse did not desert him with the passing of the sailing ship. It also dispels the notion that the modern...

Originally published in 1969. Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was thought that England, alone among the European countries, and unlike Scotland and Ireland where collections of ballads and songs had already been published as early as the eighteenth century, had no important native tradition of music. The founding of the (English) Folk-Song Society in 1898, however, and the pioneering work of such collectors as Lucy Broadwood, the Reverend S. Baring-Gould and, later, Cecil Sharp uncovered a still flourishing folk culture. Since then interest in this subject has grown...

Originally published in 1977. Frances Tolmie (1840-1926) was one of the foremost Gaelic folklore and folksong experts. This account of her life and work places her unique contribution to human song against a full personal, historical and cultural background. The book includes a selection of the songs she heard and wrote down, together with the part they played in her life and that of her circle and the larger community.

Moving in a variety of circles, Frances Tolmie experienced the warm domesticity of an enlightened Skye manse, the cultural bustle of upper middle-class Edinburgh...

Filling a gap in the sound recordings of traditional Anglo-American folk music this volume covers both vocal and instrumental material from the 1920s to the 1990s. The listings have also been limited to performers native to the tradition rather than "revival" performers. The album selection is grouped into field recordings and commercial (pre-1942) recordings, with subdivisions into individual recordings or anthologies. The discography not only reflects its author s in-depth knowledge of Anglo-American folk music s historical development but charts a valuable step forward in the...