Acknowledgements
We are very fortunate to have received generous funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and The British Academy. Without this support, the project would have been impossible and we are therefore extremely grateful.
Christopher Marsh is indebted to Trevelyan College, Durham (particularly Martyn Evans), for facilitating a Visiting Fellowship during a crucial phase, and to colleagues at Queen’s University, Belfast (especially John Curran and Scott Dixon) for advice and support along the way.
Angela McShane is hugely grateful to the Research Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum for funding fellowships permitting research into the ballad collections at the Beinecke Library at Yale (in collaboration with the Yale Centre for British Art), the Huntington Library in California and in Harvard’s Houghton Library. She is also thankful to the Bodleian Library for the award of a visiting fellowship.
The 100 Ballads project has drawn upon the expertise and abilities of dozens of individuals and we are profoundly grateful to them all (for further details, see Project Participants). In particular, we wish to thank:
Andy Watts, for organising all of the recordings from start to finish (and playing or singing on many of them). This was a huge task and we could not have done it without him. It has been a privilege to work with him, and with all of the musicians whom he recruited. Andy was also instrumental (pun intended) in organising a series of concerts and outreach activities (see below).
All of the singers and players who have made recordings for us. They come from a remarkable range of musical backgrounds, forming a star-studded cast, and we have greatly enjoyed seeing and, more importantly, hearing them at work (the names are listed alphabetically): Steve Banks, Emily Burn, Victoria Couper, Ian Craigan, Jub (Andrew) Davis, Vivien Ellis, Clemmie Franks, Ian Giles, Benny Graham, Edward Ingham, Elizabeth Kenny, Nancy Kerr, John Kirkpatrick, Giles Lewin, Raph Mizraki, Nicholas Mulroy, Emily Portman, Maddy Prior, Lucie Skeaping, Giles Underwood and Steno Vitale.
The team of technical experts who worked with the musicians on the recordings at Woodworm Studios in Oxfordshire: Stuart Jones (sound engineer and studio manager); Nicholas Parker and Adrian Hunter (recording consultants and, with Andy Watts, producers); and Arthur Young (assistant studio manager).
Developers Jamie McLaughlin, Ryan Bloor, and Director Michael Pidd of the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield. They have brought a wonderful combination of expertise and patience (!) to the task of imagining and developing our website.
Vic Gammon, for his involvement in the project during its early stages, and for recommending several folksingers to us as possible recording artists (dozens of our recordings are the direct result of these recommendations).
Catriona Edington, Daniel Patterson and Tim Somers for their excellent work as research assistants (and, in Tim’s case, essay-writer) at times of particular need. Their efforts have been greatly appreciated.
Katie Marsh for volunteering to spend part of her summer holiday feeding hundreds of verse-timings into the database, and Emily Marsh for scrutinising woodcut pictures and playing ‘spot the difference’ with her father.
Paul Hathway for making the cittern upon which Steno Vitale plays in so many of the recordings. Steno describes Paul as ‘a joy to work with’.
And various individuals for talking about the contents of the website with us and offering helpful advice: Bob Askew, Lauren Browne, Giles Bergel, Bernard Capp, Oskar Cox-Jenson, Eamon Duffy, Alexandra Franklin, Patricia Fumerton, Malcolm Gaskill, Chris Highley, Jane Hughes, Megan Palmer, Tim Reinke-Williams, Niki Russell, Carl Stahmer, Katie Steele-Brokaw, John Toal and Ian Woodfield.
The 100 Ballads project has also generated a number of outreach activities. We would like to thank Andy Watts for organising a series of concerts, and The Carnival Band and Vivien Ellis for their wonderful live performances. We are also grateful to the festivals and institutions that hosted these events: the Belfast Festival at Queen’s (now the Belfast International Arts Festival); the Brighton Early Music Festival; the Spitalfields Music Festival; the National Centre for Early Music (York); and the Beverley Early Music Festival. We thank the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) for hosting an outreach event – led by Vivien Ellis – as part of the museum’s public programme and would also like to thank colleagues at the ESRC/AHRC-funded ‘Intoxicants and Early Modernity’ project for collaborating with us on an outreach event – co-organised with Andy Watts – held at the Palace of Westminster. We are also grateful to Jennifer Richards and Richard Wistreich for inviting us to perform at the ‘Voices and books’ conference at the University of Newcastle in 2015.
Christopher Marsh and Angela McShane