Eliza Amy Forbes Carthy, MBE is an English folk musician known for both singing and playing the fiddle. She is the daughter of English folk musicians Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson.
The BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards celebrate outstanding achievement during the previous year within the field of folk music, with the aim of raising the profile of folk and acoustic music. The awards have been given annually since 2000 by British radio station BBC Radio 2.
Karan Casey is an Irish folk singer, and a former member of the Irish band Solas. She resides in Cork, Ireland.
Frankie Armstrong is an English singer and voice teacher. She has worked as a singer in the folk scene and the women's movement and as a trainer in social and youth work. Her repertoire ranges from traditional ballads to music-hall and contemporary songs, often focusing on the lives of women.
Spiers and Boden are an English folk duo. John Spiers plays melodeon and concertina, while Jon Boden sings and plays fiddle and guitar while stamping the rhythm on a stomp box. Spiers and Boden were founding members of the folk band Bellowhead.
John Gerard "Jez" Lowe is an English folk singer-songwriter. Lowe was born and raised in County Durham, in a family with Irish roots. He is known primarily for his compositions dealing with daily life in North-East England, particularly in his hometown of Easington Colliery. He attended St Francis RC Grammar School in nearby Hartlepool and later studied languages at Sunderland Polytechnic. He performs both as a solo artist and with his backing band, The Bad Pennies. In addition to singing his songs, Lowe accompanies himself and The Bad Pennies on guitar, harmonica, cittern, and piano.
"Young Hunting" is a traditional folk song, Roud 47, catalogued by Francis James Child as Child Ballad number 68, and has its origin in Scotland. Like most traditional songs, numerous variants of the song exist worldwide, notably under the title of "Henry Lee" and "Love Henry" in the United States and "Earl Richard" and sometimes "The Proud Girl" in the United Kingdom.
"Hughie Graham" or "Hughie Graeme" is Child ballad number 191, Roud 84, existing in several variants. It was collected by Robert Burns. There is a printed version in the Bodleian Library under the title "The Life and Death of Sir Hugh The Grime". It is dated between 1672 and 1696. The Burns version was printed by James Johnson (engraver) in the Scots Musical Museum 1803. It is in volume 4 song no 303, pages 312 and 313. The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library lists several other versions in printed collections, including "Scottish Ballads" (1829) by Robert Chambers.
Sandra Kerr is an English folk singer.
Faustus are a folk music duo based in the UK. The all-male membership brings together multi-instrumentalist musicians active across many other leading bands in the UK folk scene: Benji Kirkpatrick, Saul Rose and formerly Paul Sartin. They have been described as “bloke-folk” and aiming to “rescue contemporary folk from the curse of feyness”. In 2007 they received a 75th anniversary award from the English Folk Dance and Song Society, and they were nominated as best group at the 2009 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.
Jim Causley is an English folk singer, songwriter, and musician from Devon who specializes in the traditional songs and music of the West Country. Journalist Colin Irwin has called him "the finest singer of his generation".
Jon Boden is a singer, composer and musician, best known as lead singer and main arranger of Bellowhead. His first instrument is the fiddle and he is a proponent of "English traditional fiddle style" and also of "fiddle singing", both of which he employed in Bellowhead, in the duo Spiers & Boden, and previously as a member of Eliza Carthy’s Ratcatchers.
Maggie Boyle was an English, London-born folk singer, who also played flute, whistle and bodhrán.
Sue Harris is an English musician classically trained as an oboeist, but best known for her folk music performances with the hammered dulcimer.
Nancy Kerr is an English folk musician and songwriter, specialising in the fiddle and singing. She is a Principal Lecturer in Folk Music at Newcastle University. She was the 2015 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards "Folk Singer of the Year".
Pete Morton is an English folk singer-songwriter who lives in London, England. According to fRoots, Morton "is amongst the best that the British roots music scene has produced in living memory."
Arnold Martyn Wyndham-Read is an English folk singer, who was a collector and singer of Australian folk music. He lived and worked in Australia from 1958 to 1967 and was subsequently a regular visitor to the country.
Shrewsbury Folk Festival is an annual festival of folk and world music and traditional dance held in the town of Shrewsbury in Shropshire, England.
Roy Harris was a British folk singer known for his role in the starting the folk club movement in southern Wales in the 1960s. He was often referred to as the “gentleman of folk song” due to his warm personality and congeniality as a folk club host. Harris primarily sang unaccompanied sea and military songs. Over the years Harris recorded over a dozen albums, mostly on the Topic Records and Fellside Recordings labels, along with notable British singers including Ewan MacColl, Frankie Armstrong, Martin Carthy and Martyn Wyndham-Read.
Paul Sartin was an English singer, instrumentalist, composer and arranger, specialising in oboe and violin. He was best known for his work with the folk band Bellowhead, but also played with three-piece Faustus and the folk/comedy duo Belshazzar's Feast.
