Performing Folk Songs: Affect, Landscape and Repertoire

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Performing Folk Songs is the first full-length volume to explore English folk singing from the perspective of performance studies. Using archival sources, family repertoire and recorded performances of interviewees, this book argues that archives and repertoires are produced in sensory environments and through embodied encounters. Autoethnography, sensory ethnography, life-writing and landscape writing are used to explore the affective and emotional aspects of learning songs by heart. Drawing on her experience as a folk singer, Bennett contributes to discourse on English folk traditions in the 21st century and brings performance scholarship to the contemporary folk song resurgence. In analyzing the performance of English folk songs in the affective context of the archive and the landscape, the book engages with and contributes original insights to scholarship on folk music, performance studies, affect theory, cultural geography and intangible cultural heritage studies.

Reviews

Original in both form and content, Performing Folk Songs will come to be seen as a significant text in terms of critical scholarship on the interrelations of Englishness, folk song and feminism. It arrives at an important moment in British debates over folk traditions, nationalism, diversification and decolonization and engages with these openly and courageously. * Robert Macfarlane, Professor of Literature and Environmental Humanities, University of Cambridge, UK *
This rich and thoughtful study combines extensive research with an autoethnographic approach that is very moving to read. A vital contribution to thinking about folk song, and to folk singing itself as an affective, embodied, relational practice. * Angeline Morrison, folk singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, creator of The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience (Topic Records, 2022) *
Bennett's work casts a refreshing new light on folk song scholarship with her focus on performance, diversity and inclusivity and the framing of traditional repertoires in contemporary society. Through theoretical engagement and an autoethnographic account, folk song in the performative present is eloquently interrogated here through the voices of academia, other singers and, most strongly, her own. * Fay Hield, Professor of Music, University of Sheffield, UK *

Author Bio

Elizabeth Bennett is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Essex, UK. Her teaching specialisms include voice and movement, lyric writing, theatre and human rights, and gender and sexuality in performance. She was co-organizer of the ground-breaking conferences Women in the Folk (2018) and Street Music (2019).