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.
Elizabeth Bennett is an interdisciplinary researcher and lecturer, based in the UK. Her research and teaching areas include music, theatre, performance studies and creative writing. She was co-organizer of the ground-breaking conferences ‘Women in the Folk’ (2018) and ‘Street Music’ (2019).
List of SongsList of FiguresPreludeIntroductionPart 1: Theory and Methodology1:1 Affect Theory1:2 Auto/Sensory/Ethnography1:3 The Archive in Performance1.4: LandscapingPart 2: Practice2:1 Footpaths2:2 Women2:3 Lines2:4 Childhood2:5 Legacies2.6 Dorothy Marshall: A Small Story2.7 Life-writingConclusion: Part 1: 2017Conclusion: Part 2: 2022
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.