After more years of research and miles traveled than I care to think about, my book about Sabine Baring-Gould and his quest for folk songs was published in September 2017. Lots of people have told me that they like it (thank you!) and you can read some of the things people have written about the book on the ‘Reviews’ sub-page.

I was delighted when the book was the joint winner of the W. G. Hoskins Prize, which is awarded awarded annually by the Devon History Society for books by a non-academic author that best reflect aspects of the history of Devon. My delight was doubled when it was, a few weeks later, the winner of the The ‘Katharine Briggs Folklore Award’ which is given each year in memory of the life and work of the distinguished scholar Katharine Mary Briggs, a former President of the Folklore Society. The Folklore Society judges’ comments on the book were:

This is [an] exemplary work of dedicated independent scholarship that works both as narrative biography and as an opportunity to reflect again on the collector’s role in shaping and inventing ‘tradition’. Readable and rigorous, it is conscious of and fair about the work still to come.’

While the focus of the book is on Baring-Gould’s folk song collection, of which he was particularly proud, it is also a study of the hundreds of people – musicians, singers, fellow collectors and ordinary members of the public – who worked with him on this huge project. There is some biographical information about Baring-Gould himself, some of it new and coming out of my own research, and the lives of his co-workers, Frederick Bussell and Henry Fleetwood Sheppard are examined in detail for the first time. His relationships with other collectors such as Lucy Broadwood, Francis Child, Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams and his influence on the course of the revival of interest in English folk song are also described. And, perhaps most importantly, it examines the lives of many of the singers that he met and the songs that they sang.

I also look at the way in which Baring-Gould sought not just to publicise his book, Songs of the West, but also to reach out to the public at a national level through lectures, concerts, and print, to raise public awareness of English folk song.