Women's Hour: Women and Folkmusic
Listening to this amazing episode of "Women's Hour" on BBC Radio, with the theme "Women and Folk Music".
I really recommend everyone to listen to it. There's a lot of of important and interesting themes here, including interviews with multiple amazing folk artist. Peggy Seeger is one but not the only one!
A piece of it is also the wonderful, wonderful discussion of female song collectors. I love song collecting and the tradition of "house recordings", where some of these collectors visited homes around countries the world over, recording old men and women to preserve the songs that they knew.
A lot of such material from North America released by Folkways back in the 50s and 60s, and Smithsonian still offer them to be streamed via both streaming platforms and their website folkways.si.edu.
On there, there is also two of my absolutely favourite song collectors - the amazing Helen Creighton and Edith Fowke of Canada. Creighton collected over 4000 folk songs, most of them from Nova Scotia, in a career spanning 60 years. She also wrote numerous books a. Fawke collected canadian folk music for over two decades and wrote a dozen books on folk music in Canada. Check out the album "English and Irish Songs of the Ottowa Valley" by O.J Abbott for example of Fawke's recordings(she recorded 84 songs from him alone), and listen to the song "Farwell to Nova Scotia", which was discovered by Creighton
But back to topic. If you just read my rant on Edith Fowke & Helen Creighton with confusion this radio episode is perfect for you. They will introduce you to the conceot of song collecting and why we love it and love the few women that did it. Take a look:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0016x8c
