Now we are six!

A multi-award-winning singer and songwriter, Kate has been dubbed the ‘Barnsley Nightingale’ in tribute to a South Yorkshire background which has given her a puckish, down-to-earth humour that shines through in the inter-song banter of her stage sets.

Kate (pictured) traditionally appears with a trio of folk musicians. At the Oxford Folk Festival though, she performs with what is practically an orchestra, the virtuoso Donald Grant and the Red Skies String Ensemble. It should be an exciting occasion — and not to be missed.

Other Town Hall headliners include the amazing Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, the bhangra-driven Dhol Foundation, Oxford’s own John Spiers and Jon Boden and the hotly-tipped Scottish trio LAU.

Wynndebagge the Piper’s hilarious New St George Waits appear at the Holywell Music Room, and the foot-stomping ceilidh outfit, the Cock and Bull Band, at Oxford Brookes.

As ever, you can expect a wealth of free outside entertainment as some 600 morris dancers flood the city centre over the weekend. Don’t miss the grand parade which departs from Oxford Castle at 11am on Saturday to caper in Cornmarket till noon. Choirs are a special feature of our festival this year. On Saturday, March 21, youngsters from all over Oxfordshire will have an unprecedented opportunity to perform. Between noon and 6pm no fewer than 16 school choirs will appear at Oxford Castle and the Holywell Music Room, where you can also see local celebrities the Blackbird Leys Choir, who featured in Channel 5’s Singing Estate programme.

Song leader Cat Moore said: “This is such an amazing opportunity for the children — to be able to perform at a large event and in such incredible venues is going to be a very exciting experience for them. Singing is so good for you — it boosts self esteem and makes you feel really great. This is a wonderful chance for us to reinforce.”

Saturday at the Holywell will be rounded off in style as the Oxford Folk Festival’s own community choir, Rising Voices, will launch the Oxfordshire Singing Histories project with a workshop on traditional Oxfordshire songs, in which all-comers are invited to participate.

Singing Histories forms part of a major initiative sponsored by the National Lottery, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Its aim is for the whole nation to sing up — to realise the power of shared song. All kinds of events are planned, culminating on August 24 with mass city sings in Big Screen/ Livesites across the UK. These will be led by community choirs and form part of the official Olympic handover celebrations.

As part of the initiative, eight counties have been invited to produce a booklet of folk songs from their part of the country — songs through the ages which tell stories, make you laugh or cry, but above all which you enjoy singing.

I was thrilled to be invited to compile the booklet for Oxfordshire, and it has been quite a challenge — not because there is any scarcity of material but because there is so much.

My eventual selection includes many standards which will be very familiar to anyone with an interest in the music of our county.

The Boar’s Head Carol, for example, has been sung in Queen’s College at Christmas every year at least since Tudor times. I have also included the nonsensical As I Was Going to Banbury, the jaunty Eynsham Poaching Song and the beautiful Near Woodstock Town which contains all the classic ingredients of a folk song about unrequited love — a seduced maiden, a cruel squire, a suicide and a ghost.

The booklet also includes some songs chosen chiefly for their historic interest. In the year of Charles Darwin’s centenary celebrations, I was fascinated to discover a Dr Darwin ballad in the Bodleian Library’s Broadside Ballad Collection. It dates from around the time of the great 1860 debate on evolution held at the Oxford University Museum, containing lines like: Some monkeys they are vastly kind, And some apes have no tails behind, And that’s where they’re so like mankind According to Doctor Darwin.

The fish in shore and out at sea, Related are to you and me, Think of that when you’ve shrimps for tea, According to Doctor Darwin.

Chorus: Hokey, pokey, monkey fum, Wonders never will be done Huxley and Lubbock, and everyone Supporting Doctor Darwin.

The song, with its passing references to Thomas Huxley and Sir John Lubbock (another distinguished supporter of Darwin), is an ephemeral piece. Newsworthy in its day it never ‘caught on’ in the folk tradition.

In marked contrast, however, I also claim for Oxfordshire one of the most enduring of all traditional English songs. Early One Morning is a touchstone. No-one can say where it really originated, but the tune was first noted down in the 18th century by a man called John Baptist Malchair, who heard it being sung in the streets of Oxford.

Malchair was a violinist and composer who led the band at the city’s prestigious new concert hall, the Holywell Music Room. Although classically trained, he also loved the music of ordinary people and used to ramble about the city, noting down any tunes he heard being played by street musicians.

In his diary, he wrote that he got Early One Morning ‘from the singing of a Poor Woman and two female children, Oxford, May 18, 1784.’ As far as is known, there is no earlier record of the air.

Songs like this were passed on from generation to generation among Oxfordshire folk and elsewhere. They migrated by word of mouth, or through reproduction on cheaply printed ballad sheets that were sold in masses by travelling peddlers at markets and fairs.

Ballads became the hit records of their day, and the most popular sold in tens of thousands. The ballad-seller would sing his or her wares, and could sometimes be seen wetting a thumb to detach a sheet from a bundle and hand it to a customer while still singing.

Alfred Williams, who collected many songs in the Thames Valley in the 1920s, wrote that some items might be favourites at harvest homes, and concern mowing and reaping.

Others were popular with ploughboys and got taught in the stables; others still were chanted by sheep-shearers as they clipped fleeces in springtime.

Williams also wrote that serving girls in the kitchens of farms and country houses had regular musical evenings and taught each other new material there.

Perhaps this was the milieu in which Early One Morning really took off. Certainly, by the 1850s, it had spread like wildfire. Victorian song collector William Chappell wrote that the song was already a nationwide favourite with serving maids and he had heard it sung by them ‘from Leeds, from Hereford, and from Devonshire, and by others from parts nearer to London.’ This sheer quality of singability is what makes a great folk song. The test is to sing it — and we hope that you will enjoy doing so when our choirs invite you to join choruses and sing rounds at what promises to be a brilliant festival. Choir concerts on Saturday, March 21, at Oxford Castle and the Holywell Music Room are free, as is the Singing Histories workshop at the Holywell. No experience is necessary to join in — just enthusiasm!