‘I’ve got to stop somewhere!’ How Steve Roud compiled his epic folk song archive

Cecil Sharpe

The former librarian has spent more than 50 years compiling the Roud Folk Song Index, cataloguing 25,000 traditional songs. So how did he do it? And what exactly is a folk song?

 

By Andrea Valentino

When Steve Roud was young, he began collecting records. Hardly unusual for a child of the 1950s – but this boy from south London was different. Not content with just listening to LPs, Roud began indexing them – his own and ones he found mentioned in newspapers and magazines. He used old shoe boxes as a primitive filing system and wrote the titles on 5×3 inch record cards that his mum bought him once a week. He soon realised his hobby was turning into something more. “Without knowing it,” he says, “I was becoming a librarian.”

 

Soon enough, Roud would become one for real, working much of his career for the London borough of Croydon. His infatuation with indexing would persist too, those shoe boxes finally swelling into something remarkable. Even as a teenager, Roud had been fascinated by folk music – how across the centuries, dozens of voices could send songs shooting countless different ways, their titles and lyrics shifting even as their cores remained the same. As he grew up, armed with proper training and new technology, Roud took to collating this bounty in earnest, hunting down leads and developing an elegant method to trace a song’s heritage.

 

The result, the product of 52 years of effort, is the Roud Folk Song Index. Including hundreds of thousands of references to tens of thousands of songs, Roud’s work spans the anglophone oral tradition, taking in English villages, Appalachian hilltops and harbours in the Caribbean. The index has become indispensable for folk fans worldwide, bolstering genealogy projects and inspiring musicians. In its size and ambition, Roud’s project speaks to the challenges of constraining such a varied tradition – and even to deciding what folk music actually is.


People have systematically collected traditional English music for more than a century. In the years before the first world war, enthusiasts such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp scoured country lanes and village inns for people to record, worried that industrialisation and urban life would soon wash traditional tunes away. Musicians both, Williams and Sharp also wanted folk melodies to inform English classical music, just as Sibelius did in Finland or Antonín Dvořák in Bohemia. Visiting King’s Lynn, in 1905, Vaughan Williams spent time at the Tilden Smith, a pub where local fishers were sheltering from January storms. The songs Vaughan Williams heard there may have influenced some of his most famous compositions, appropriate for a man who once called music “the expression of the soul of a nation”. These early English collectors, for their part, were shadowed by colleagues across Britain and Ireland, and in the New World.

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“The Good Old Way” Episodes 1-4

Part 1 of a 4 part series about British folk music. Originally aired on BBC2 on June 13 1983. This episode focuses on The Watersons.

Part 2 of a 4 part series about British folk music. Originally aired on BBC2 on June 14 1983. This episode focuses on Alison MacMorland and Peta Webb

Part 3 of a 4 part series about British folk music. Originally aired on BBC2 on June 15 1983. This episode focuses on Martin Carthy and Ewan MacColl.

Part 4 of a 4 part series about British folk music. Originally aired on BBC2 on June 16 1983. This episode focuses on Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger.

How Laura Marling’s new music was inspired by Maya Angelou’s ode to motherhood

KCRW’s In Residence sessions feature storytelling performances and commentary from some of our favorite artists. Laura Marling performs new music from her 2020 album “Song For Our Daughter,” and tells us about teaching guitar lessons.

British singer-songwriter Laura Marling has accomplished a lot across seven studio albums and 12 years recording music. She’s garnered Mercury Prize and Grammy nominations, collaborated with Ed O’Brien of Radiohead, Blake Mills and others, and she’s even started teaching online guitar lessons, which she details below. This all to say, she’s a supremely talented artist who moves in dynamic ways within the folk-rock lane. 

Her new album “Song For Our Daughter” was scheduled to come out later this summer but she found an opportunity to connect us all during the COVID crises by releasing it early. Marling said in a statement regarding the change of date, “In light of the change to all our circumstances, I saw no reason to hold back on something that, at the very least, might entertain, and at its best, provide some sense of union.” The album is a nod to Maya Angelou’s collection “Letter To My Daughter.” Marling herself is not a mother but she takes us there through her delicate songwriting — writing for a girl who needs confidence and hope.

Marling last visited Morning Becomes Eclectic in 2017, behind her Grammy-nominated album “Semper Femina,” and we were impressed by the ornate full band performance. For In Residence, she’s stripped back the arrangements to present two tracks from her new album and a throwback to 2011 — all recorded exclusively for KCRW. Check out the session and read on for more about her current projects.

How did your online guitar lessons come about? Are you teaching your own songs or covers? Tell us all about the project.

They came about just as a product of wanting to contribute something to the effort of distracting people (or perhaps myself) from the anxiety over what was going on in the world. In the first week of lockdown in the UK, I started doing live tutorials of some of my old songs, showing people the tricks I use in different tunings, etc. Continue reading