I would have thought that there are several different strands to be dealt with - the tales about the aristocracy with incest and vengeful brothers etc - the oppression and occasional joys of the common man (and woman) on land and at sea - the often relatively self-contained heritage of the travelling folk.

Then you come to the industrial revolution.

Unless your development is to be purely anecdotal you will have to deal with the issue of definition and how the industrial revolution leads to a different concept of "community".

You need scholastic sources to depict the marginal lifestyle of periods when prudent housekeeping was essential and an imprudent budget manager or small misfortune could readily tip a family into destitution and the dreaded workhouse.

You need pictorial sources - and paintings from that era like "the Haywain" tend to picture a rural idyll when the reality was often less idyllic and you could starve if "God's lantern" did not enable you to till your tiny field with a hand plough until midnight before rising at dawn.   Maybe reconstructions for TV of medieval life can help you here.

Dentistry and surgery of those ages - and the view of the church of those who had learned without formal training what herbs could achieve by way of medicine - all provide some gripping horror stories.

To demonstrate the music of the ages you can use recordings from recent times of the formal musics to contrast the vernacular music, but the vernacular music is hard convincingly to reconstruct. You will probably need a musician who can play the recorder and whistle, the drum, the lute and guitar and indeed viol and fiddle would be useful. The transformation of the music is surely very important to the picture.

Once you reach the industrial revolution at least broadsides can lend you texts, although often the tunes are lost.

You know your English source singers well so I need offer no great hints.

Luckily, the traveller heritage may provide some recordings - even as recently as the Brasil family and photographs from the 1950s are most evocative.


You will appreciate that this is very different from the US common use of the expression "folk music" or "folk musician".