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.

Why is the North East the most distinctive region of England? Where do the stereotypes about North Easterners come from, and why are they so often misunderstood? In this wideranging new history of the people of North East England, Dan Jackson explores the deep roots of Northumbrian culture--hard work and heavy drinking, sociability and sentimentality, militarism and masculinity--in centuries of border warfare and dangerous and demanding work in industry, at sea and underground. He explains how the landscape and architecture of the North East explains so much about the people who have lived there, and how a 'Northumbrian Enlightenment' emerged from this most literate part of England, leading to a catalogue of inventions that changed the world, from the locomotive to the lightbulb. Jackson's Northumbrian journey reaches right to the present day, as this remarkable region finds itself caught between an indifferent south and a newly assertive Scotland. Covering everything from the Venerable Bede and the prince-bishops of Durham to Viz and Geordie Shore, this vital new history makes sense of a part of England facing an uncertain future, but whose people remain as distinctive as ever.

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.

Scottish traditional music has been through a successful revival in the mid-twentieth century and has now entered a professionalised and public space. Devolution in the UK and the surge of political debate surrounding the independence referendum in Scotland in 2014 led to a greater scrutiny of regional and national identities within the UK, set within the wider context of cultural globalisation. This volume brings together a range of authors that sets out to explore the increasingly plural and complex notions of Scotland, as performed in and through traditional music. Traditional music has played an increasingly prominent role in the public life of Scotland, mirrored in other Anglo-American traditions. This collection principally explores this movement from historically text-bound musical authenticity towards more transient sonic identities that are blurring established musical genres and the meaning of what constitutes ‘traditional’ music today. The volume therefore provides a cohesive set of perspectives on how traditional music performs Scottishness at this crucial moment in the public life of an increasingly (dis)United Kingdom.

Originally published in 1915, this volume provides a concise introduction to English folk songs and folk dances.

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.