Presenters

Frankie Armstrong

Frankie Armstrong started singing professionally in the folk scene in 1964, and has largely focused on both traditional and contemporary songs that illuminate women's lives - both past and present. She has also sung for the Peace movement, and social justice campaigns. She has made 12 solo albums, been on numerous themed albums, and has coauthored/coedited three books including Well Tuned Women: Growing strong through Voicework (which she was commissioned to write as a result of running voice workshops since 1975).

Sam Baxter

Sam Baxter is a singer and multi-instrumentalist gaining a reputation for his work with traditional music. A passionate and enthusiastic performer, his love for the old stories and music of our islands shines through as he forges his own path in traditional music, creating contemporary sounding arrangements of traditional song that resonate with modern audiences whilst still remaining true to the traditions he knows and loves. A rising name in the English folk scene, Sam is gaining attention for his captivating arrangements of traditional song; his sensitive and minimalistic guitar accompaniment; and his distinctive voice and singing style.

Elizabeth Bennett

Elizabeth Bennett is a lecturer in Drama at the University of Essex. Her research interests include folk singing, street music. applied, community, and participatory theatre, and contemporary performance in relation to space, place, and landscape. She enjoys singing in folk clubs and as part of natural voice community choirs. Previous publications include her co-authored public report with George McKay, From Brass Bands to Buskers: Street Music in the UK (2019).

Caroline Bithell

Caroline Bithell is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Manchester, UK. She has published two monographs, Transported by Song: Corsican Voices from Oral Tradition to World Stage (2007) and A Different Voice, A Different Song: Reclaiming Community through the Natural Voice and World Song (2014), and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Music

Revival (2014). Her current research focuses on Georgian traditional music in the 21st century.

Jon Boden

Professional singer, musician, composer since 2001. Best known as lead singer and main arranger of Bellowhead. Has composed extensively for theatre and for concert, and runs a monthly folk club and a weekly village choir in the village of Dungworth. BA (Medieval Studies) Durham, MMus (Composing for Theatre) LCM, Hon DMus (Durham), Hon DPhil (Open University)

Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne

Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne is a singer and player of Anglo concertina and melodeon. Since entering the scene in his teens, Cohen has amassed awards and nominations including the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Horizon Award in 2018. He has toured extensively across the UK and abroad, both as a soloist and with the trio Granny’s Attic.

Christopher Butler

Christopher Butler (BA, MA, MBACP, he/him) is retired. Born in 1952 in London, he graduated with a degree in Classics. Working in the building trade until 1990, he also trained and qualified as a psychotherapist and worked thereafter until retirement as a psychotherapist and as a manger in the field of student mental health and welfare. He has a MA Management from Greenwich Business School and now, as well as helping Morag run the venue, is completing a PhD in ethnomusicology at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Morag Butler

Morag Butler (BA, MA, she/her) is a folk singer and venue promoter at Rosslyn Court in Margate. Born in 1957 in Newcastle-on-Tyne and having graduated from the LSE with a degree in sociology, she has worked as a carpenter, a college lecturer (initially specialising in carpentry and joinery, thereafter in ESOL and in supporting students with ESNs) and now runs a venue and B&B. Morag holds an MA in Post-compulsory Education from the University of Greenwich.

Mollie Carlyle

Mollie Carlyle is a second-year PhD student at the University of Aberdeen, currently undertaking research into the life and legacy of ‘the last shantyman’, Stan Hugill. Mollie’s doctoral thesis is a collaborative project between the Music department and the Elphinstone Institute, combining ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and analytical study.

Rebecca Erickson

Rebecca Erickson is a musicologist, currently residing in the USA. She successfully defended her thesis, Middlebrow Musical Misogyny, at the University of Amsterdam for the doctoral degree in March of 2021. Her research focuses on medially narrated processes of identity, tropes in music and film, and the philosophy of cultural analysis.

Richard Louis Gillies

Richard Louis Gillies is a scholar specialising in Russian and East-European music and culture. His first book, Singing Soviet Stagnation: Vocal Cycles from the USSR, 1964–1985, explores song, poetry, and identity during the post-Stalinist era. He is currently a lecturer in music at the University of Glasgow.

Rowan Hawitt

Rowan Hawitt is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, currently researching how contemporary folk musicians in the UK conceptualise questions of time around environmental and climate crises. Her published work deals with ‘ecological thinking’ in music, phenology and the environmental humanities, and cultural understandings of ecological grief. She is a saxophonist, cellist, and singer and has toured across Europe, Asia, New Zealand, and the USA.

Fay Hield

Fay Hield is Professor of Music at the University of Sheffield. She is the lead researcher on the Access Folk project and combines audience research, ethnomusicology and artistic research as a practising performer. She is also founding director of Soundpost, a community music organisation based in Sheffield.

Rosie Hood

Esperance is a grassroots collective of people who wish to discuss and address gender equality issues in the English folk scene. We aim to increase awareness and understanding of gender-related barriers, support people who experience gender-based discrimination, and facilitate conversations that lead to positive change. Our vision is for a change in culture in order to create a safer, more inclusive community and an equal, sustainable future for the folk scene in England. www.esperancefolk.com

Tiffany Hore

Tiffany Hore is the Director of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at the English Folk Dance and Song Society. She completed a first degree in History at the University of Cambridge and an MA in Library and Information Studies at UCL, before working in both medicine and the arts across a range of academic and specialist libraries. Her position at EFDSS, where she has been since 2020, allows her to combine her interests in the social history of music with a mission to make our cultural heritage accessible to all. She is also a classical flautist and singer.

Alexandre Hurr

I am currently studying Traditional music in the British Isles at the University of Sheffield. My background is in music recording and production, having been previously published in the Audio Engineering Society Journal. My undergraduate dissertation was an ethnographic study of contemporary folk music in the South West of England.

Elina Hytönen-Ng

Dr. Elina Hytönen-Ngholds the title of docent in ethnomusicology at the University of Turku. She is a cultural researcher who has specialised in the study of musical and sonic experiences. She has been an academic visitor at the University of Oxford, and a visiting research fellow at King’s College London. Currently, she is the primary investigator in a three-year project focusing on lamenting rituals in contemporary Finnish society.

Emilia Kallonen

Emilia Kallonen Is a folk music pedagogist and a folksinger. She practises modern lamenting as a performing artist and teaches lamenting as a form of creative self-expression based on the Karelian tradition. At the moment she is working as a lamenting artist in the research project Kyynelkanavat.

Kirsty Kay

Kirsty Kay is a research associate on the University of Sheffield’s Access Folk project, looking at ways to increase and diversify participation in folk singing in England. Trained in Anthropology and Nationalism Studies, her PhD from the University of Glasgow (2020) looked at minority nation-building in the Hungarian táncház (dance house) movement. She is co-founder of the Editing Cooperative, which seeks to provide equitable writing support in academic publishing.

Sandra Kerr

Sandra Kerr has had a long and distinguished career in folk music, as a pupil of MacColl & Seeger, as a multi-instrumentalist, singer and song-writer (well known as the co-composer of the award-winning Bagpuss music) as a lecturer on the Newcastle Folk Degree, and as a Director of Folk Choirs. She would describe herself as a trans-inclusive Feminist and green Socialist.

Paul Mansfield

Paul Mansfield is a Derbyshire-based independent researcher. A graduate of the University of Sheffield’s World and Traditional Music programme, he has authored/co-authored publications and conference papers on floor singers’ repertoires, the organisation of folk clubs, clubs online during the pandemic, and the history and dynamics of song collecting.

Hazel Marsh

Hazel Marsh is an Associate Professor in Latin American Studies, University of East Anglia,

UK. Her research interests include popular music and social activism, politics and popular

culture, collective memory and identity, creative arts and community action, culture and

disaster risk reduction, and Romani Studies.

Rose Martin

Rose Martin is a singer, choir leader and music educator whose two favourite things have always been folk music and choral singing. She now gets to combine those in her work for EFDSS running the Cecil Sharp House Choir, and Rising Voices, Oxford’s only folk choir, amongst a myriad of performing work across many genres.

Laura Midgley

Studied Music and English at Royal Holloway University of London (2018) Organised cross-cultural gigs and festivals in London and Athens Currently working as a fundraiser for charities supporting migrants and refugees Studying the saz, performing in a folk duo, and working on their first album.

Hugh Miller

I have been singing in local folk clubs for 60 years, on and off. I am an independent researcher, after a career of teaching psychology and social sciences in design at Nottingham Trent University.

Maddie Morris

Maddie Morris is an artist who strives to make a difference in the world. Bold, insightful and unique, she takes traditional songs in new directions to shine light on contemporary issues. Maddie was the winner of the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award and was described by Jim Moray as "leading the next generation of socially conscious songwriters."

John Nicholson

John Nicholson is an amateur singer-songwriter with many years’ experience singing in, and helping to run, folk clubs. He delivered a workshop on his recent Hope Valley song cycle at the 2022 Soundpost Weekend. He also helped research background material for Fay Hield’s blogs in support of her 2021 Wrackline album.

Tony Phillips

Tony Phillips has been a folk singer, barn dance band member, folk music promoter, session/singaround host and songwriter for the past 45 years. He is currently a co-organiser of the Bury Folk Festival in Suffolk and the Green Gathering Festival in Chepstow.

Emily Portman

Eileen Richardson

I am a retired Psychology Lecturer and have been a regular attender at folk clubs for over twenty years. For the past seven years I have run a monthly afternoon folk club in Sunderland. Although not involved in academic research, I presented a paper to the Traditional Song Forum during lockdown which has recently been published in Thirsty Work and Other Legacies of Folk Song, edited by Steve Roud and David Atkinson.

Susanne Rosenberg

Susanne Rosenberg is a folk singer and Professor of folk singing at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Sweden, with an extensive career as a singer, researcher, and pedagogue. The Swedish Research Council supports the Folk Song Lab research project with a three-year grant.

George Sansome

George Sansome co-founded Queer Folk with Sophie Crawford, and together they’re working to explore LGBTQIA+ folk songs, develop LGBTQIA+ community within the trad folk scene, and amplify the voices of LGBTQIA+ musicians.

Liz Sheppard

Liz holds an MA from the University of Sheffield in Traditional Music of the British Isles and is a long-term folk enthusiast. She is a full time civil servant (currently on a research sabbatical at the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge), and a full time wheelchair user. When she has disposable income, it usually goes on gig tickets.

Roary Skaista

Roary Skaista (they/them) is a singer-songwriter based in Oxford and London and the new Trainee Music Leader for EFDSS' Inclusive Folk, working with Emmie Ward and Charlotte Turner at Cecil Sharp House and SEN/D schools in London. As a queer autistic person, they explore in their own work themes of queer experience and disability in the hopes that voicing these issues will help the next generation with self-discovery and self-acceptance. Aside from their own music and work with Inclusive Folk, they are involved in many other initiatives to make folk singing and dancing more inclusive to all!

Kate Thompson

Kate is a voice specialist who delivers voice, singing and music education workshops in an exciting variety of contexts. She has completed postgraduate research under the tutelage of voice specialists Jenevora Williams and Declan Costello, focussing on folk singers and their approaches to singing.

Jessie Thompson

Jessie Thompson is a singing teacher studying for an MA in Traditional and World Music at the

University of Sheffield. She is currently researching contemporary professional folk singing

techniques bringing together her love of singing pedagogy and ethnomusicology.

Charlotte Turner

Charlotte Turner is Education Manager at the English Folk Dance and Song Society and prior to this was a secondary school music teacher.

Rachel and Becky Unthank

Rachel and Becky Unthank are sisters, born seven and a half years apart, who grew up in Ryton, Tyne and Wear. Rachel graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in History and Theatre Studies; Becky studied History of Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University. They front The Unthanks, known for their eclectic approach in combining Northumbrian folk music, with other musical genres. They also run a series of singing workshop weekends and take part in many musical and media projects.

Emmie Ward

Emmie Ward is a folk musician and lead tutor of Inclusive Folk. She holds a PG CERT in music and special needs using Sound of Intent with Roehampton University.

Lucy Ward

Named ‘brit-folks most vibrant and forthright talent’ by MOJO, ‘impressive and original’ by the Guardian and ‘inspiring’ by Billy Bragg, BBC Radio 2 Folk Award winner Lucy Ward is a critically acclaimed singer songwriter and folk musician hailing from Derbyshire. In 2021, Lucy launched 'Thank Folk For Feminism' in collaboration with activist and Violence Against Women and Girls expert Lisa 'Pinky' Ward; a podcast celebrating the music, stories and experiences of women and non-binary folk within the folk industry.

Esbjörn Wettermark

Esbjörn Wettermark is an Access Folk Project Research Associate at the University of Sheffield. He has researched and worked with folk and traditional music in the UK, Sweden and Vietnam. In addition to his involvement with Access Folk, he is working with the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library and the University of East Anglia to highlight the contributions of Gypsy and Traveller singers in the English Folk Scene.