"I got nothing...": Non-Folk Singers' Views of the Folk Scene

Access Folk is a research project exploring ways to increase and diversify participation in folk singing in England. Like many in the arts, the folk scene is facing hardship because the impacts of covid-19 and the current economic climate are affecting venues, organisers, amateur and professional singers and audience members alike. These issues, combined with the ageing of many of the scene’s key activists, raises questions about how the folk singing scene in England might develop over the coming decades. At University of Sheffield, a team of academic and community partners are looking into the current problems and testing potential solutions. The five-year project (2022-2027) hopes to prompt action to help increase accessibility to folk singing for more diverse populations in England.

This poster presents some initial findings from Access Folk’s Ask a Friend project and was presented as part of the 2023 Folk Singing Symposium at the University of Sheffield. It was co-produced together with two Ask a Friend co-researchers that helped analyse the initial data and then wrote individual sections for the poster presentation. They looked at references to gender in the interviews’ Word Association exercise (Emily Porter) and on recurrent reference to different musical instruments (Jill Waterfield)

Map data @2022 Google

This project received ethical approval by University of Sheffield: 47631

All the available items arising from the project are available in the Access Folk Collection.