Contains music.

This broad-based collection of essays is an introduction both to the concerns of contemporary folklore scholarship and to the variety of forms that folk performance has taken throughout English history. Combining case studies of specific folk practices with discussion of the various different lenses through which they have been viewed since becoming the subject of concerted study in Victorian times, this book builds on the latest work in an ever-growing body of contemporary folklore scholarship. Many of the contributing scholars are also practicing performers and bring experience and understanding of performance to their analyses and critiques. Chapters range across the spectrum of folk song, music, drama and dance, but maintain a focus on the key defining characteristics of folk performance – custom and tradition – in a full range of performances, from carol singing and sword dancing to playground rhymes and mummers' plays. As well as being an essential reference for folklorists and scholars of traditional performance and local history, this is a valuable resource for readers in all disciplines of dance, drama, song and music whose work coincides with English folk traditions.

"The work here reprinted is essentially in two parts, an examination of the history of the English folk-song by Frank Kidson, together with a similar analysis of the English folk-dance by Mary Neal"--Dust jacket flap.

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.

This collection is filled with songs that tell of the pleasures and pains of love, the patterns of the countryside and the lives of ordinary people. Here are unfaithful soldiers, ghostly lovers, whalers on stormy seas, cuckolds and tricksters. By turns funny, plain-speaking and melancholic, these songs evoke a lost world and, with their melodies provided, record a vital musical tradition. Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside � but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land � as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man�s relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

Music and Heritage provides new thinking about the diverse ways people engage with heritage. By exploring the relationships that exist between music, place and identity, the book illustrates how people form attachments to place and how such attachments are represented by sound and music-making. Presenting case studies and perspectives from across a range of genres, the volume argues that combining music with heritage provides an alternative and productive opportunity to think about heritage values and place attachment. Contributions to this edited collection use a diversity of methods, perspectives, cues and genres to reflect critically on issues related to these and other interconnections in ways that encourage new thinking about the character, meaning and purpose of cultural heritage, and the various ways in which people can interact with it through sound – thus re-encountering the supposedly familiar world around them. Taking heritage studies, musicology and place-making research in new directions, Music and Heritage will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, history, music, geography and anthropology. It will also be relevant to those with an interest in how music relates to place-making and place attachment, as well as to practitioners and policymakers working in the planning, design and creative sectors.