Performing Folk Songs: Affect, Landscape and Repertoire

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 Lecturer in Drama at the University of Essex, UK. Her teaching specialisms include voice and movement, lyric writing, theatre and human rights, and gender and sexuality in performance. She was co-organizer of the ground-breaking conferences ’Women in the Folk’ (2018) and ’Street Music’ (2019).