Folk Music Journal 2022
In late November, the English Folk Dance and Song Society will publish the 2022 issue of Folk Music Journal (FMJ) – the annual scholarly journal of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.
Editor David Atkinson introduces the new issue (Volume 12 Number 2):
- Drawing on his own extensive experience as a collector, Gwilym Davies explores mouth music for English step-dancing, a practice that that may be quite well known but which has attracted little scholarly attention.
- An unusual piece of social history takes the form of the bell harp, or ‘box of bells’, made by Somerset carpenter Eli Coleman, which has come into the hands of Rod Howell, who describes the instrument, its uses, and something of the life of its maker.
- A different kind of social history is gleaned by Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe from the description of social dancing in rural Suffolk in the inter-war period provided in Adrian Bell’s 1932 semi-autobiographical novel The Cherry Tree.
- John Howson has researched the remarkable life and work of Edward Rushton, who was blind from the age of nineteen but nonetheless campaigned for the abolition of slavery, founded the Liverpool Blind School, and wrote radical poems and ballads which were widely printed.
- The final article is a more reflexive piece in which Keith Gregson draws on his own correspondence with Roy Palmer, esteemed folk song scholar and member of the FMJ Editorial Board, who died in 2015. The letters are now in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.
- The reviews section is headed by the landmark publication of The Routledge Companion to English Folk Performance edited by Peter Harrop and Steve Roud, a ground-breaking blockbuster with twenty-six chapters ranging right across this journal’s main areas of interest in folk dance, folk song and music, and folk drama.
- Other reviews cover dance in Scotland and across Europe, Irish music, shanties, street literature, children’s street songs, local and regional music-making, women, and the FBI(!), as well as Bruce Lindsay’s much-anticipated book on Harry Cox and Sam Larner.
- On a more sombre note, there is an obituary of Peter Cooke, distinguished ethnomusicologist and long-standing member of our Editorial Board.
Members of the English Folk Dance and Song Society can now search and view all previous issues of the Journal, and of its various predecessors dating all the way back to the first Journal of the Folk-Song Society in 1899, by logging into the Members’ area of this website and following the link to the digital library JSTOR. The members-only area also allows members to download PDFs of complete issues from 2014, strictly for their own personal study, and to search these same issues using various criteria.
As well as this increasing range of digital options, personal (non-group) members are invited to opt-in to receive the printed Folk Music Journal by post. All Institution and Library members receive the printed FMJ by default.
Other benefits of being a member of the English Folk Dance and Song Society include the quarterly English Dance and Song magazine and discounts on learning and safeguarding programmes from partner organisations. Membership also directly supports the organisation’s charitable activities.
