In addition to his continuing career as a perfomer, Brian Peters has over the past dozen years been researching various aspects of folk song. He has always believed in understanding the historical background of the traditional songs he sings, and this led initially to a scholarly essay on the origins and development of ‘The Wild Rover’. The musical project ‘Sharp’s Appalachian Harvest’ led to an academic article on the subject published in 2018, and this was followed later by another describing the return visits to the mountains made by his much younger collecting partner Maud Karpeles over 30 years later. Brian feels strongly that Cecil Sharp has been misrepresented by recent critics, particularly with respect to his Socialist politics and his practice as a field collector, and has published a series of articles over the past few years to set the record straight. The history of the folk song revival during the 1950s and 1960s, and the work of A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl in making the songs attractive to a new audience (sometimes by altering them almost out of recognition), is another of Brian’s particular interests, and he has published a book chapter on that topic as well.
Many of these papers have appeared in the Folk Music Journal, available free to members of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, and a selection are available for free download on Brian’s Academia page.