This Library Lecture was originally presented at Cecil Sharp House by Polly Paulusma.
It is a surprisingly little-known fact that the novelist Angela Carter was a folk singer in the 1960s second-wave folk revival. A newly unearthed archive reveals that she not only co-founded a folk club in the 1960s with her first husband, folk producer Paul Carter, but that she also sang there fortnightly for several years. This lecture collates some of the evidence of Carter’s folk singing praxis through revealing some key details from the newly-discovered archive and how it influenced her writing.
Polly Paulusma is a songwriter and academic. She recently submitted her PhD at UEA, researching Angela Carter’s influences from folk song performance, under supervision from Dr Stephen Benson. She also teaches for the Cambridge English Faculty, specialising in song studies.
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