In late November, the English Folk Dance and Song Society will publish the 2023 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 3):
- Mary Emmett reassesses the place of Lakeland hunting songs in the twenty-first century, redefining the term to place them in their contemporary, functional context, and without shying away from the potentially controversial nature of their content.
- Eleanor Rodes considers the life and work of Eloise Hubbard Linscott, New England housewife turned folk song collector, who was kept somewhat at arm’s length by the established scholarly collecting community, even while her Folk Songs of Old New England (1939) was beloved by generations of New England families and used extensively in schools.
- Angela Carter is well known as a writer and as editor of the Virago books of folktales, but Polly Paulusma explores what she learned from the 1960s folk revival and her exposure to the work of Cecil Sharp and AL Lloyd.
- Turning to Scotland, Amanda MacLean analyses a unique variant of the much-loved ballad of ‘Mill o’ Tifty’s Annie’ from the Traveller tradition.
- Finally, Martin Graebe’s library lecture on the Arts and Crafts movement in the Cotswolds and its influence on the early folk revival has been expanded into a journal article, which reveals a network of individuals, especially women, who were vital to the work of figures like Cecil Sharp.
- Sharp has of late been widely criticised, and especially so in The Folk, the new book by Ross Cole, which is reviewed at some length. Other books reviewed include a new edition of songs collected by Alfred Williams, a history of the Manley Morris Dancers, and some recent collections of sea shanties, which became so popular during the Covid pandemic. Other subjects include Scottish song collections, Welsh wassailing, dance and the Romantic imagination, sword dancing in Handsworth and Woodhouse, popular music, old-time music, broadsides and street literature, as well as a new set of four CDs of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s folk song settings.
- Sadly, we also have obituaries for John Howson and Gwilym Davies, who will have been known to may readers of the journal.
Members of the English Folk Dance and Song Society can 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.
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