Folk Music Journal 2022
Volume 12 Number 2
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.
