Folk Shop

Singing & Dancing Wherever She Goes: Life of Maud Karpeles

Written by the late Simona Pakenham





Maud Karpeles’ biography was published in 2011. A personal friend of Maud’s, Pakenham combined information from a number of sources: Maud’s unpublished autobiography, notebooks, letters and diaries, supplemented by the reminiscences of many friends.

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A Secret Stream

FOLKSONGS COLLECTED FROM ENGLISH GYPSIES

Selected by Nick Dow with notes by Steve Gardham

Musical notation has been transcribed by Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne



A Secret Stream is the first of two volumes of traditional songs collected from English Gypsies and is an important source book for folk singers and musicians and anybody with an interest in Romany and Traveller culture.

It brings together over a hundred mostly unpublished folksongs and tunes, carols, including songs in the Anglo-Romany tongue, collected from English Gypsies by Victorian and Edwardian collectors such as Cecil Sharp, Ella Leather, Lucy Broadwood, George Borrow and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Classic English Folk Songs

Selected and Edited by R. Vaughan Williams and A. L. Lloyd

Revised by Malcolm Douglas



First published in 1959 as The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, this ground-breaking collection reclaimed traditional song from the school and the recital room, and from the ‘evening dress’ into which it had so often been put during the first half of the twentieth century.

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Community Dances Manual

Revised Edition

Edited by Les Barclay and Ian Jones




A classic collection of English and American social folk dances and tunes. This is a 2015 reprint (with newly designed front cover, new subtitle and additional introduction) of the 2005 revised edition of this well-loved original series of dance instructions and tunes which began in 1947.

The book contains more than 130 English and American social folk dances and tunes for English country dancing, ceilidhs, barn dances and American contra dances; with dance notation and music on facing pages for ease of use. An extensive glossary provides detailed notes on formations, steps and figures for anyone not familiar with the terms used.

Buy as a set with the Community Dances CD

Dear Companion

Compiled and edited by Mike Yates, Elaine Bradtke and Malcolm Taylor

Preface by Shirley Collins




Appalachian Traditional Songs and Singers from the Cecil Sharp Collection.

A collection of fifty-three songs and ballads from Sharp's American collection... together with biographical sketches of the singers and notes on the songs.

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English Traditional Dancing (Book)

Instructions for 28 dances in traditional English style for dance beginners of all ages.





Suitable for school teachers, community leaders and home learning families with little or no prior knowledge of English traditional social dancing. Designed to work with the accompanying CD.


Buy as a set with the English Traditional Dancing CD

Folk Music Journal 2022

Volume 12 Number 2


Folk Music Journal 2022 front cover

Folk Music Journal (FMJ) is a unique specialist scholarly journal. Published by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, it is the annual publication of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. It is edited by David Atkinson.

Includes:
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.

Folk Music Journal 2024

Volume 12 | Number 4


Folk Music Journal 2024 front cover

The English Folk Dance and Song Society has published the 2024 issue of Folk Music Journal (FMJ) the annual scholarly journal of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. Editor David Atkinson.

This year’s journal begins with the two trips Maud Karpeles took to the Appalachians to revisit some of the singers she and Cecil Sharp had met when they made their collecting trips in 1916–18. In 1950, not only had times changed in the Appalachians but Karpeles was now accompanied by the American folklorist Sidney Robertson Cowell, and the two collectors’ approaches to folk song differed markedly. Catherine Kiebert Kerst and Brian Peters chart the collecting trip and the singers, and also these changing paradigms for the study of folk song. In 1955, Karpeles was accompanied by her old friend Evelyn Wells, whose company and views she clearly found more congenial.

Joe Oldaker explores morris dancing at Polesworth in north Warwickshire between 1910 and 1915, when a morris ‘troupe’ was started by a local lady, Mrs Fowler. The troupe and its repertoire were influenced by prevailing notions of ‘Merrie England’ and by the teaching of the Espérance Club, but in the end the performances in Polesworth and the neighbourhood were an independent phenomenon, adapted to the local community.

In 1840 three Irish navvies working on the construction of the Glasgow–Edinburgh Railway were convicted of the murder of a ‘ganger’, or foreman. The incident was widely reported in the press and a song was made on the events, though (surprisingly) no print copies have been identified. The song, however, has persisted in the repertoires of a number of traditional singers. Ian Russell uses this framework to explore the notion of ‘truth’ in folk songs, a long-standing focus of scholarly interest going back to the work of Herbert Halpert as long ago as 1939.

The final article this year concerns the songs of Belgian lacemakers. Although the focus of the journal is usually the English-speaking world, on occasion comparative reference can be both fascinating and instructive. Lacemakers in England habitually sang at their work, and their songs ranged across the canon of folk song, but in Catholic Europe the repertoire was much more of a focus of contention. David Hopkin describes the political – ideological – struggle in which the lacemakers of Middelburg in East Flanders
were caught up in the 1840s.

This issue also contains notes on Welsh traditional music and the Goathland Plough Stots.

There is the usual healthy crop of reviews, beginning with Michael Heaney’s eagerly awaited and monumental history of morris dancing. Following the anniversary year in 2022 there are two new publications on Ralph Vaughan Williams, who, of course, did so much to support the work of EFDSS, which we at Folk Music Journal endeavour to continue. There are further contributions on step-dancing, clog dancing, morris in the North-West, and cultural dance in Australia. Songs and revivals are well represented in various guises, both English and American, and there are second editions of a couple of books that may already be known to readers, Robin Morton’s admirable Folksongs Sung in Ulster, and Michael Brocken’s study of the folk revival. The Anglo-Scottish triple hornpipe and the Anglo-concertina both attract attention. So there is something for everyone.

Folk Music Journal

Volume 12 | Number 5


Folk Music Journal 2025 front cover

The English Folk Dance and Song Society has published the 2025 issue of Folk Music Journal (FMJ) the annual scholarly journal of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. Editor David Atkinson.

The 2025 issue of the journal will be the last in Volume 12. It kicks off with a study of sea shanties, in particular the much-loved American shanty ‘Shenandoah’, written by acknowledged shanty expert Gibb Schreffler. And nowadays everyone loves shanties, or ‘chanties’ as Gibb prefers, but you’ll have to read the article to find out why. Then that old chestnut, what is folk?, which Peter Harrop tackles from a novel angle by comparing morris and sword dancing with the development of the Northern Soul scene, shedding unexpected light on the matter.

Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe provides an exhaustive study of the origins of the ‘Varsoviana’, the couple dance that will be familiar to many under various titles (‘Shoe the Donkey’, ‘Turkey Rhubarb’, among others), which takes us rattling through Spain, Poland, and the racy world of Parisian salons, ending up on the London stage. For the less terpsichorean and more computer-minded, Mike Boursnell tries out the application of phylogenetic software from his background in biological sciences to tracing the evolutionary trees of Child ballads. Does the transmission of songs stand comparison with the evolution of species?

In ‘Lucky Lukey’s Northsea’ George Frampton brings to life manuscript sources and a series of newspaper columns to shed new light on singing in the North-East fishing village of Cullercoats before the First World War. Sean Goddard’s note revives, or rediscovers, the country dance ‘The Quaker’s Wife’ as played on the anglo-concertina by William Kimber.

Reviews include David Sutcliffe’s major new biography of Cecil Sharp. At last we have an authoritative source for what Sharp got up to. No doubt he will continue to be the target for agenda-driven criticism, but at least the outline of his work collecting folk songs, tunes, and dances is available for all. There is also a new book about the suffragette and morris dance pioneer Mary Neal, with whom Sharp fell out. Equally to blame, it seems. There are books about the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, the great Scottish singer Jock Duncan, songs collected by the late John Howson, another volume of songs from Gypsies and Travellers, essays on folk songs, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and eighteenth-century street literature. And more, and a handful of films about British customs and Sidmouth Folk Week. As editor, I am ever grateful to everyone who has contributed to making this volume possible, and I trust EFDSS members, and all readers of the journal, will find something to interest them, and perhaps be prompted to submit their own research findings to the journal.

The Histories of Morris in Britain

Edited by Michael Heaney




This book is not currently available in printed form. You can download the full book as a PDF without charge here.

The Histories of the Morris in Britain presents the proceedings from the two-day conference held at Cecil Sharp House on the 25th and 26th March 2017, organised by the Historical Dance Society and English Folk Dance and Song Society.

Morris is an enduring feature of British culture across more than six centuries, and this conference celebrated the dance form and shared the latest in morris dance research. Topics ranged from the early days of morris dance as found in the Jacobean court, to the revival and formation of women’s sides, alongside explorations of context, costume, and competing art forms.

Locating Women in the Folk


Perspectives on Women’s Contributions to Folk song, Folklore, and Cultural Traditions is the publication of the conference proceedings



The conference which took place at the University of Sussex in 2018 aimed to place a spotlight on the significant role of women as scholars, singers, collectors, storytellers, dancers and educators of folk across the world.

Marrow Bones

Selected and Edited by Frank Purslow




First published in 1965, Marrow Bones drew on the existence of largely unpublished folk song collections made by Henry and Robert Hammond and Dr George Gardiner between 1904 and 1909, chiefly in Dorset and Hampshire, which are held in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House in London.

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May Day in England

An Introductory Bibliography

By Roy Judge




The booklet offers some introductory guidance to enquirers about May Day in finding relevant material.

An invaluable guide to the literature on May Day, from its disputed origins to its current practice. Considering the customs associated with May Day, their religious and political aspects, local celebrations, the roles taken by children, sweeps and milk-maids, and links to other folkloric topics such as the Green Man and Victorian ruralism.

Maypole Manual

Mike Ruff and Jenny Read




The Maypole Manual has full colour pictures and diagrams of 19 different dances of accessible and curriculum-relevant content. The manual also includes further information on the origins and history of maypole dancing, inclusion, links to the wider curriculum, music for musicians to play and much more.


Buy as a set with the Maypole Manual CD

Room, Room, Ladies and Gentleman - English Mummers’ Play

Published by EFDSS in association with The Folklore Society 2002.




This is a concise introduction to this complex subject and selected texts which represent the various types of play known to have existed within England since records began.


There are also some hints on performing the plays in a school context, or anywhere, for that matter!


Southern Harvest

ENGLISH FOLK SONGS FROM THE HAMMOND AND GARDINER MANUSCRIPTS

Edited by Frank Purslow and Steve Gardham




Including the words and music for nearly 300 songs.


An omnibus volume containing The Constant Lovers and The Foggy Dew, completing the series originally edited by Frank Purslow and published by the English Folk Dance and Song Society in the late 60s and early 70s. Foreword by Martin Carthy MBE.

Southern Songster

ENGLISH FOLK SONGS FROM THE HAMMOND AND GARDINER MANUSCRIPTS

Selected by Nick Dow

Musical notation by Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne
With notes by Steve Gardham



The Hammond and Gardiner manuscripts are amongst the most important nineteenth-century collections of English folk song.

Stepping On

Paperback publication




Papers from a conference held at Cecil Sharp House, London on Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th November 2019, edited by Toby Bennett.

Stepping On: A conference on Stepping in Dance was organised jointly by the Historical Dance Society, English Folk Dance and Song Society, Instep Research Team and the Dance Department of the University of Roehampton.

The focus was on various forms of stepping and step dancing with connections to Britain and Ireland, with papers featuring England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia, Canada and the United States. A number of dance styles were featured, including English clog, Cape Breton step dancing and stepping in social dances, and a broad range of themes was addressed including history, analysis, migration, competition, social dance, reconstruction, music and transmission.

A free PDF download is also available.

See the PDF download page for a list of the papers and speakers.

Still Growing

English Traditional Songs and Singers from the Cecil Sharp Collection





50 songs from the enormous volume of collected works of Cecil Sharp, with music and notes on the singers.

An introduction on Cecil Sharp and English Folk Music by Vic Gammon.

Published by EFDSS in association with Folk South West 2003.

Street Literature and the Circulation of Songs





Papers exploring the production, distribution and use of street literature, including broadside ballads, chapbooks and other cheap printed items.

The Making of a Tradition


EAST LANCASHIRE CLOG DANCING

By Pat Tracey

Edited by Roy Tracey, Christina Tracey and Alison Cannard



The Making of a Tradition: East Lancashire Clog Dancing explores the history of clog dancing by one of its most accomplished performers, Pat Tracey.

The book is lavishly illustrated and contains the notations for many of the dances.

The Wanton Seed

ENGLISH FOLK SONGS FROM THE HAMMOND AND GARDINER MANUSCRIPTS

Originally selected and edited by Frank Purslow

Revised by Malcolm Douglas and Steve Gardham with notes by Steve Gardham



The Hammond and Gardiner manuscripts are amongst the most important nineteenth-century collections of English folk song.

Traveller's Joy

Songs of English and Scottish Travellers and Gypsies

Compiled by Mike Yates
Foreward by Norma Waterson




Traveller’s Joy is first and foremost a songbook, a collection of over fifty songs to be learned, sung, and enjoyed by the reader. The intention is to portray the singers and their music with honesty and sensitivity.

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Vaughan Williams and Folk: 150th Anniversary Essays


Edited by Steve Roud and David Atkinson

Published by The Ballad Partners, ISBN 978-1-9161424-6-6

A selection of essays celebrating Ralph Vaughan Williams’ lifelong involvement with British folk song and music – as collector, editor, arranger and composer – many first presented at the Library Conference in 2022.

View Contents

Book cover showing RVW in later middle-age

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