News

22 September 2023

In recent months we have continued our series of papers of folk and traditional music topics, with Thirsty Work and Other Legacies of Folk Song and, to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of his birth, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Folk: 150^th Birthday Essays. The street literature series has also progressed with A Notorious Chaunter in B Flat and Other Characters in Street Literature. All of these collections are edited by David Atkinson and Steve Roud, and you can see what they contain by clicking on view contents on the publications tab. Two more collections of essays will be published during the winter season.

An exciting new departure for us will be the publication of our first full-length biography in November – Cecil Sharp and the Quest for Folk Song And Dance: a New Biography, by David Sutcliffe. Cecil Sharp was the most prolific, and most outspoken, of the great generation of Victorian and Edwardian folk collectors, and this is the first full treatment of his life and work for over 50 years. It is the result of many years of research, and includes a great deal of information and insight previously unavailable.

The pandemic has not deflected us from our mission of producing affordable publications in support of research into traditional song and music, street literature and popular culture.

 We already have two volumes of street literature papers:
Street Literature and the Circulation of Songs, and
Printers, Pedlars, Sailors, Nuns: Aspects of Street Literature,

and the third -

A Notorious Chaunter in B Flat, and Other Characters in Street Literature will be available very soon.

 On the folk song front, Old Songs, New Discoveries* will soon be joined by another volume: Thirsty Work and Other Legacies of Folk Song, which is based on the presentations at the popular fortnightly online meetings of the Traditional Song Forum (see www.Tradsong.org).

And last year we published our first full-length book - The Forgotten Songs of the Upper Thames: Folk Songs from the Alfred Williams Collection, by Martin Graebe, which has proved our best-selling volume so far.

*The first in our Folk Song series, Proceedings of the EFDSS Folk Song Conference 2013, edited by David Atkinson & Steve Roud, was published by Loomis Press in 2015, and is still available from the usual online booksellers.

Over the past few years, the annual the conference Broadside Day has allowed scholars from Britain, Ireland, and beyond to share their research on the production, distribution and use of street literature. We are pleased to be able to bring together a selection of these papers for our latest volume, Street Literatre and the Circulation of Songs / Edited by David Atkinson & Steve Roud. 

We are pleased to announce the release of our first publication Old Songs, New Discoveries : Selected Papers from the 2018 Folk Song Conference / Edited by Steve Roud & David Atkinson. To order your copy, go to our "Publications" page.

Welcome to the website of The Ballad Partners. We are a small publisher specialising in scholarly texts dedicated to traditional song, music, and dance. 

Please explore the website to find out more and to see our latest publications.