Folk music is still very much alive and kicking
As a writer who obsesses over the right title to grab a target audience, seeing a book subtitled ‘Song Collectors and the Life and Death of Folk Tradition’ I say, count me in. It’s a challenging subject, not often trodden with aplomb. I wasn’t even dissuaded when the first line on the inner jacket — ‘This is the first ever book about song collectors…’ — caused me to wonder what those multiple volumes cluttering up my groaning shelves were. Michael Church could have started with Mary Beth Hamilton’s admirable study of blues collectors, In Search of the Blues (2007), an excellent template. Instead, the five-book checklists at the end of
