In The Late Victorian Folksong Revival: The Persistence of English Melody, 1878-1903, E. David Gregory provides a reliable and comprehensive history of the birth and early development of the first English folksong revival. Continuing where Victorian Songhunters, his first book, left off, Gregory systematically explores what the Late Victorian folksong collectors discovered in the field and what they published for posterity, identifying differences between the songs noted from oral tradition and those published in print. In doing so, he determines the extent to which the collectors distorted what they found when publishing the results of their research in an era when some folksong texts were deemed unsuitable for "polite ears." The book provides a reliable overall survey of the birth of a movement, tracing the genesis and development of the first English folksong revival. It discusses the work of more than a dozen song-collectors, focusing in particular on three key figures: the pioneer folklorist in the English west country, Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould; Frank Kidson, who greatly increased the known corpus of Yorkshire song; and Lucy Broadwood, who collected mainly in the counties of Sussex and Surrey, and with Kidson and others, was instrumental in founding the Folk Song Society in the late 1890s. The book includes copious examples of the song tunes and texts collected, including transcriptions of nearly 300 traditional ballads, broadside ballads, folk lyrics, occupational songs, carols, shanties, and "national songs," demonstrating the abundance and high quality of the songs recovered by these early collectors.

Establishing an intersection between the fields of traditional music studies, English folk music history and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this book responds to the problematic emphasis on cultural identity in the way traditional music is understood and valued. Williams locates the roots of contemporary definitions of traditional music, including UNESCO-designated intangible cultural heritage, in the theory of English folk music developed in 1907 by Cecil Sharp. Through a combination of Deleuzian philosophical analysis and historical revision of England’s folk revival of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Williams makes a compelling argument that identity is a restrictive ideology that runs counter to the material processes of traditional music’s production. Williams reimagines Sharp’s appropriation of Darwinian evolutionary concepts, asking what it would mean today to say that traditional music ‘evolves’, in light of recent advances in evolutionary theory. The book ultimately advances a concept of traditional music that eschews the term’s long-standing ontological and axiological foundations in the principle of identity. For scholars and graduate students in musicology, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology, the book is an ambitious and provocative challenge to entrenched habits of thought in the study of traditional music and the historiography of England’s folk revival.

Victorian Songhunters is a pioneering history of the rediscovery of vernacular song—street songs that have entered oral tradition and have been passed from generation to generation—in England during the late Georgian and Victorian eras. In the nineteenth century there were four main types of vernacular song: ballads, folk lyrics, occupational songs, and national songs. The discovery, collecting, editing, and publishing of all four varieties are examined in the book, and over seventy-five selected examples are given for illustrative purposes. Key concepts, such as traditional balladry, broadside balladry, folksong, and national song, are analyzed, as well as the complicated relationship between print and oral tradition and the different methodological approaches to ballad and song editing. Organized chronologically, Victorian Songhunters sketches the history of English song collecting from its beginnings in the mid-seventeenth century; focuses on the work of important individual collectors and editors, such as William Chappell, Francis J. Child, and John Broadwood; examines the growth of regional collecting in various counties throughout England; and demonstrates the considerable efforts of two important Victorian institutions, the Percy Society and its successor, the Ballad Society. The appendixes contain discussions on interpreting songs, an assessment of relevant secondary sources, and a bibliography and alphabetical song list. Author E. David Gregory provides a solid foundation for the scholarly study of balladry and folksong, and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Victorian intellectual and cultural life.

In recent years, the assumption that traditional songs originated from a primarily oral tradition has been challenged by research into ’street literature’ - that is, the cheap printed broadsides and chapbooks that poured from the presses of jobbing printers from the late sixteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. Not only are some traditional singers known to have learned songs from printed sources, but most of the songs were composed by professional writers and reached the populace in printed form. Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America engages with the long-running debate over the origin of traditional songs by examining street literature’s interaction with, and influence on, oral traditions.

In Victorian times, England was famously dubbed the land without music - but one of the great musical discoveries of the early twentieth century was that England had a vital heritage of folk song and music which was easily good enough to stand comparison with those of other parts of Britain and overseas. Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, and a number of other enthusiasts gathered a huge harvest of songs and tunes which we can study and enjoy at our leisure. But after over a century of collection and discussion, publication and performance, there are still many things we don't know about traditional song - Where did the songs come from? Who sang them, where, when and why? What part did singing play in the lives of the communities in which the songs thrived? More importantly, have the pioneer collectors' restricted definitions and narrow focus hindered or helped our understanding? This is the first book for many years to investigate the wider social history of traditional song in England, and draws on a wide range of sources to answer these questions and many more.

This is the first book to combine contemporary debates in ballad studies with the insights of modern textual scholarship. Just like canonical literature and music, the ballad should not be seen as a uniquely authentic item inextricably tied to a documented source, but rather as an unstable structure subject to the vagaries of production, reception, and editing. Among the matters addressed are topics central to the subject, including ballad origins, oral and printed transmission, sound and writing, agency and editing, and textual and melodic indeterminacy and instability. While drawing on the time-honoured materials of ballad studies, the book offers a theoretical framework for the discipline to complement the largely ethnographic approach that has dominated in recent decades. Primarily directed at the community of ballad and folk song scholars, the book will be of interest to researchers in several adjacent fields, including folklore, oral literature, ethnomusicology, and textual scholarship.

The relationship between language and music has much in common - rhythm, structure, sound, metaphor. Exploring the phenomena of song and performance, this book presents a sociolinguistic model for analysing them. Based on ethnomusicologist John Blacking's contention that any song performed communally is a 'folk song' regardless of its generic origins, it argues that folk song to a far greater extent than other song genres displays 'communal' or 'inclusive' types of performance. The defining feature of folk song as a multi-modal instantiation of music and language is its participatory nature, making it ideal for sociolinguistic analysis. In this sense, a folk song is the product of specific types of developing social interaction whose major purpose is the construction of a temporally and locally based community. Through repeated instantiations, this can lead to disparate communities of practice, which, over time, develop sociocultural registers and a communal stance towards aspects of meaningful events in everyday lives that become typical of a discourse community.