About 52fs

Written September 2011, updated August 2015

Welcome to Fifty-Two Folk Songs, which hosts 52 folk songs… plus another 47, and 43 that aren’t folk songs. Roughly.

My name’s Phil Edwards, and I’ve been singing in folk clubs for about twelve years. Rather more recently, around 2007, I became properly aware of traditional songs, and since then they’ve formed most of my repertoire.

Like many people, I was knocked out by Jon Boden’s A Folk Song A Day project; when it ended I thought it would be good to do something along the same lines. Only not updating daily, obviously. Then, in September 2011, I turned 51 and realised that I was now living through the 52 weeks of my 52nd year. Spooky. Well, not very spooky, but still – if I was ever going to publish a folk song a week (say) for a year (say), this seemed like a pretty good time to start.

Doing a song a week – or maybe two – was a great opportunity to learn more songs and improve my singing. As it’s turned out, it was also an opportunity to brush up my playing, learn new instruments and start layering different sounds on top of each other. I still love unaccompanied singing, but playing around with recording software can be an awful lot of fun. Midway through the year I became the proud owner of an English concertina, which features on several tracks; I’m still at the start of my journey as a concertina self-accompanist, though.

The 52, 99 or 142 folk songs haven’t been added to since September 2012, apart from a few re-recordings; I may do more in that line. In the mean time I’ve reopened this blog as a space for stray thoughts about folk and related matters.

And here we are. Share and enjoy! You can subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed on the main page, or follow me on Twitter (Flandyke).