Folk Music Journal: Volume 9 Number 1

Folk Music Journal: Volume 9 Number 1

Volume 9 Number 1 (2006) contains the following pieces:

Articles: 

Keith Chandler  Popular Culture in Microcosm: The Manuscript Diaries of Richard Heritage of Marsh Gibbon, Buckinghamshire

All too often, popular culture has been segmented and compartmentalized by collectors and historians: this informant was a singer, that a musician, a third a morris dancer. Frequently overlooked is the reality that individual talent may be projected in numerous directions. Previously unseen outside of a family context, thirty years' worth of unpublished diaries maintained by an inhabitant of the rural south midlands during the first half of the nineteenth century, whose activities encompassed all of these fields and others, permit a unique, in-depth study of the popular culture of that time and region. 

Graham Seal A. L. Lloyd in Australia: Some Conclusions 

The nature and extent of A. L. Lloyd's editing and reworking of Australian folk songs has long been a controversial issue in Australia. Examination of the extant Lloyd papers and a survey of the work of other researchers allows for a critical consideration of Lloyd's editorial practices and also an assessment of his importance for Australian folk song scholarship. These issues are significant ones, both for understanding the nature of the Australian bush song tradition and for its general presentation to the public. 

David Atkinson, Folk Songs in Print: Text and Tradition 

'Oral tradition' has long been considered a define characteristic of folk song. Yet England has been a text-based society over the whole of the period from which ballads and folk songs are known (often through printed sources). In place of the emphasis on orality, therefore, a characteristic kind of textuality, described here as 'vernacular', unstable, or 'centrifugal', is identified in folk songs, irrespective of whether they are manifested in singing or in print. Unlike the 'literary' texts presented, for example, in Percy's Reliques, individual texts of this kind carry no special textual authority in themselves but rather an inherent reference outwards towards all their other actual and potential manifestations, regardless of format, embracing the possibility of variation as well as of continuity. This kind of vernacular textuality, it is argued, provides an important locus for the instantiation of 'tradition'. 

Michael Yates and Steve Roud Alice E. Gillington: Dweller on the Roughs

Alice E. Gillington was a pioneer collector of songs from English Gypsies and yet today she remains largely unknown. Although invited to join the Folk-Song Society, she never did so. This paper considers her collection and collecting methods, asks why Gillington remained apart from other collectors, and tries to discover why she chose to follow her own path.

Correspondence

Reviews — Books

Reviews — CD ROM

Reviews — Sound Recordings

Obituary

Cover illustrations: Richard Heritage, probably 12 September 1860. Photograph courtesy of Jill Jay. Page from Richard Heritage's manuscript tune book. Keith Chandler Collection

Editor: David Atkinson