Traditional Song Forum Meeting, 28 Apr 2018

Held atCecil Sharp House, London

Attendance at the meeting was lower than usual because of other events taking place on the same day. Nevertheless, those who did attend enjoyed a day when the focus was on books. We are, again, grateful to EFDSS for allowing us to hold our meeting at Cecil Sharp House.

Welcome

Martin Graebewelcomed everyone and reassured those present that the Chairman, Steve Roud, would be joining the meeting later.

TSF business

1 Data protection

A Data Protection Policy and Privacy Statement were the first steps in making our system for managing communications and membership compliant with the new General Data Protection Regulations. We are expecting that, by the time the regulations come into force in May, most members will gave given their permission for us to hold their data.

2 Membership

We recently decided that we will no longer charge a membership subscription for the Traditional Song Forum. We will, instead, rely on donations received at our meetings and from a scheme for ‘Friends of TSF’. Details of that scheme are being worked out, but we have already had pledges of support, some very generous. [During the meeting a number of donations were received from those attending, amounting to £111.]

3 Future meetings

The next meeting will be held at NewcastleUniversity on 20 October. Planning for meetingsin 2019 has started and various possibilities are being looked at including Manchester (in the year in which Peterloo is remembered). It was suggested that the National Library of Wales would be a good venue. Further afield, we might consider another meeting in Dublin and it was suggested that Bruges might be an interesting location. Broadside Day 2019 is likely to be held in Birmingham and consideration is being given to another ‘Broadside Extra’ event.

Networking Session

Paul and Liz Davenport are currently recording a new album which will include some of Paul’s own songs as well as some rare traditional material. They reported that the Sheffield Sessions Festival, which had taken place over the Easter weekend, had made a profit for the first time.

Bob Askew referred to the recent death of Paul Marsh, and the great loss that it meant to traditional song studies in Hampshire and more widely. He is preparing a paper for the upcoming conference, Locating Women in ‘The Folk’ on Grace Kimmins and the Guild of Play. He will be doing a ‘Ballad Chat’ session for Soundpost. He is producing a CD of recordings based on the repertoire of the singer Patience Vaisey, recorded in Oxfordshire by Lucy Broadwood, though she was born in Hampshire.

David Atkinson is also talking at the Locating Women in ‘The Folk’ conference, in his case about ‘Women in the ‘Eighteenth-Century Ballad Trade’. He has recently published another book - The Ballad and its Pasts,Literary Histories and the Play of Memory(See News Page of the TSF website for details and discount offer). He is also (with Steve Roud) working towards a book on European Street Literature. This year’s issue of the Folk Music Journal is currently in preparation.

Andy Rouse is working on an e-book of the proceedings of the Ballads Conference held in Hungary. His recent CD was reviewed in English Dance and Song.

Derek Schofield is now organising the reviews for the Folk Music Journal. His presentation at the Locating Women in ‘The Folk’ conference will be ‘International Relations: The role of Violet Alford and Maud Karpeles in expanding the horizons of the English folk dance revival between the wars and beyond’.

Carol Davies reported that the Gloucestershire Traditions project is looking for funding to continue its development. She is hoping that they will be able to improve the links from to other websites.

Gwilym Daviessaid that he had been doing a number of talks about ‘Grainger in Gloucestershire’ and ‘Gypsy Songs in Gloucestershire’. His own recordings are currently being catalogued for the British Library Sound Archive and should be ‘live’ next year.

Sue Allan is working on her book on Traditional Music, Dance and Song of Cumbria. She raised the topic of charging for talks. She is becoming reluctant to do talks without charging a fee or getting expenses, since they take a lot of time to prepare, and travel and other costs are often involved. Others around the table agreed and it was established that fees ranging from £50 to £150 were being asked for – and sometimes received. This is a topic that would merit further discussion among TSF members. Sue’s thesis is now available on the ‘Ethos’ website. She asked people’s opinions on the ‘Academia’ social media construct, to which she belongs. The view was generally rather sceptical, though there are good reasons for those who actually work in Academia to belong.

Lewis Jones is continuing to transcribe tunes for the VWML Digital Database (formerly known as the ‘Full English’). He said that much of the Carpenter material has not been transcribed into musical notation from the recordings. He also maintains his interest in analysis of tunes. He is looking into the question of why it appears that the rarer modes ‘disappeared’ from the tradition after WWII. In Fred Hamer’s collections, for example, virtually all the tunes are in major keys. Gwilym Davies said that he had found that gypsy singers retained modes later.

Martin Graebe was preparing a talk on Baring-Gould in Cornwall for presentation the following weekend. He is also working on another talk for an audience in Cirencester where he has looked at what could be discovered in a 10-mile radius of the town. Apart from being visited by three collectors (Sharp, Williams and Carpenter) he has found more on the history of the Cirencester broadside printer, William Clift. Also of interest is the part played by a small group of local women in popularising folk dance, at both a local and a national level. He highlighted an aspect of study of the Victorian and Edwardian folk song collectors that he feels has been neglected and that is the accompaniments that they gave their published work. It may be that, because we don’t approve of their efforts, we have missed an opportunity to study and understand what they were doing.

Forum Focus Session –A Strange Survival: Putting Songs into Print

When the Traditional Song Forum was founded there was a general view that the Internet and the growth of electronic media would lead to a reduction in the quantity of printed books and journals about traditional song. While there have been major changes in the production and retail of hard copy books, the flow of new books published has not decreased as much as had been feared. Indeed, digital printing technology and ‘print on demand’ processes have opened possibilities for writers and small, specialist publishers. This session looked at various aspects of publishing traditional song via the printed page.

Introduction: The Importance of Print – Martin Graebe

Introducing the topic Martin talked about his own relationship with books as systems for sharing knowledge. The conventional book still has some advantages over e-books, other than the aesthetic qualities, notably that it is an effective random-access system which can make it easier to go back to look at something again. But, through a good index is very helpful, it is not as good as an electronic search.

Collecting books, rather than just buying them for use, introduces the idea of monetary value. It is unlikely that books about folk songs will attract four figure sums, but it is not unknown. Sometimes the value is not in the book itself but in notes made by a previous owner, particularly a ‘famous’ one. There may be cuttings or other useful scraps in the book. Introducing the idea of value also imposes the requirement to look after a book – perhaps repairing or rebinding it. If the book is truly valuable, then this should always be done by a professional binder, but some simple book repairs are within the capability of anyone who is good with their hands.

The main topic for the day, though, was the process of creating a printed book: writing, editing, designing, proof-reading, indexing, printing, publishing, promoting and selling. The speakers addressed many of these and there were some case studies.

The writer’s perspective – Steve Roud

Steve has worked at the popular end of the market, and only with major publishers – which is very fortunate but is rather different to the experience that most of those present might have. His advice is that writers should always aim to reach as high a level in the world of publishing as possible, but that comes at the price of losing control over some aspects of publication such as title, cover design etc. It also means, though, that you will be working with professional editors, designers, indexers, etc.

There have been many changes in the business, even in the time that he has been involved. Print runs are shorter, for example. Authors advances are about half what they were in the past.

Amazon has been, on the whole, good news for the business. Prices of books have been maintained or increased because Amazon expects to take 60% (traditional booksellers expected 30% in the past). In general, publishers have put prices up to support the discounters.

Research libraries are, increasingly, taking e-books and will rent these on an annual basis – reducing the number of copies they rent as demand drops. Deposit copies are more likely to be submitted in electronic form.

Supporting the writer – David Atkinson

David, from his perspective as Editor of the Folk Music Journal, as well as a writer himself, gave a number of practical hints. He suggested that it was a good idea to turn off the auto-correct feature in Word to avoid unexpected changes that might not be spotted. It is a good idea to keep formatting to an absolute minimum when writing for submission. His way of working is to take Word files and drop them into InDesign.

His recommended reference for style and matters of punctuation is the MHRA Style Guide, which is available free of charge on the Internet (go to He recommends leaving the bibliography until you have finished writing your book/paper. Music should be provided as a separate piece of artwork.

Micropublishing – Martin Graebe

Martin described the techniques that he has used for very small scale publishing of song books and newsletters (100 – 200 copies). He produced examples of items that he had produced since the 1970s, showing the development of techniques from providing artwork with hand lettering and Letraset to a printer to producing the whole book on a desktop computer and sending it to the printer electronically. He mentioned some points that he thought were important:

  • Design is important – think about margins, gutters and white space (lots of it!)
  • Choose an appropriate font (NOT Comic Sans!). Use a single font throughout, though headings and cover artwork may be different.
  • Think about the appropriate weights of paper/card for book and cover.
  • Think how the book is to be used. For music and songs, a spiral binding is very practical, but it is not a good idea if you are expecting to sell through a bookseller, as the title won’t be displayed.
  • Remember the requirement to provide four deposit copies to the British Library You may be asked for more by other deposit libraries.
  • It is not a legal requirement to have an ISBN number, but booksellers (including Amazon) won’t take your book without one. Neither will it be catalogued by the British Library or any archive.
  • If you are publishing traditional songs think about copyright. What are you protecting: is it your introduction and text, your arrangement, or what? Think about a Creative Commons license.

Macropublishing - Carol Davies

Carol talked about producing and publishing her book, Really Beautiful Company; Traditional Singers and Musicians of Gloucestershire. This was one of the outcomes of the Gloucestershire Traditions Project and its publication was partly funded by the project.

They chose to self-publish the book through Matador, a company who specialise in this area (go to Having produced the content, Matador carried out the design and preparation. Carol said that they were very good in this respect and that their online information was excellent. They are pleased with the result and sales are, at this early stage, going well.

Help! I’m Lost in Bookworld – Sue Allan

Sue is working on her book about Traditional Music, Dance and Song of Cumbria, and hopes to find a publisher near the top end of the market. She doesn’t want to have to do all the work associated with self-publishing – particularly distribution. She, and those present, talked for a while about the difficulties this posed.

Other matters

Advice for authors:

  • Don’t give copies of your book to your friends –they are the people most likely to buy it.
  • Include your enemies in your acknowledgements.

Steve Roud reported that Reactions Books are looking for someone to work with them on a book of (and about) sea shanties. They are also interested in a book on black-face minstrelsy.

This year’s Folk Song Conference will take place on 10 – 11 November at Cecil Sharp House. There is no theme and the call for papers has gone out.

Thanks

Thank you to EFDSS and the staff at Cecil Sharp House for hosting the meeting and for their help on the day.

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