Original in both form and content, Performing Folk Songs will come to be seen as a significant text in terms of critical scholarship on the interrelations of Englishness, folk song and feminism. It arrives at an important moment in British debates over folk traditions, nationalism, diversification and decolonization and engages with these openly and courageously.

Robert Macfarlane, Professor of Literature and Environmental Humanities, University of Cambridge, UK

This rich and thoughtful study combines extensive research with an autoethnographic approach that is very moving to read. A vital contribution to thinking about folk song, and to folk singing itself as an affective, embodied, relational practice.

Angeline Morrison, folk singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, creator of The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience (Topic Records, 2022)

Bennett's work casts a refreshing new light on folk song scholarship with her focus on performance, diversity and inclusivity and the framing of traditional repertoires in contemporary society. Through theoretical engagement and an autoethnographic account, folk song in the performative present is eloquently interrogated here through the voices of academia, other singers and, most strongly, her own.

Fay Hield, Professor of Music, University of Sheffield, UK

[A] moving and rigorously researched book … A core text for the study of folk songs … The book [offers] a template into how to synthesize artwork, diverse forms of data, and lived experience into a research practice that is questioning, creative, and emotionally articulate.

Nancy Kerr Elliott, Folk Music Journal