We are The Song Detectorists!

In March 2025, the project team were joined by presenter Matthew Bannister and Rhubarb Rhubarb producer Natalie Steed to record our explorations of musical treasures from local archives across England for a new BBC Radio 3 series ‘The Song Detectorists’. The series, broadcast on 12-16 May 2025, likens us to metal detectorists, ‘searching for musical gold in the county record archives of England’. Through our project’s discoveries and creative re-interpretations, the series aims to tell new stories about the diverse musical and social history of England.  

Each programme focuses on one or two manuscripts from a county archive, with the tunes re-imagined for the 21st century in recordings by Nancy and the Melrose Quartet. For Stephen this involved going back to Norfolk, where he did scoping work for the project in 2021, and Hampshire where our pilot project funded by Hampshire Archives Trust digitised the 1822 tunebook of Richard Pyle among other sources. Kirsten and Steph revisited the tunebook of Henry Atkinson, one of the Newcastle hostmen who controlled the export of coal from the Rver Tyne. There were also new discoveries from the project including the Eleanor Morgan book of carols in Cornwall as uncovered by Caro, and Louisa Winn’s music book from West Yorkshire as catalogued by Andrew.  

The series connects the sources with the places where the music may have originally been sung or played, and with local historians or musicians in these locations. In mid-Norfolk we visited Mileham church, talking with the churchwardens and congregation about the likely location of the singers’ gallery, and in the nearby village of Gressenhall we talked with local historian Bridget Yates about the social profile of villagers involved in parish psalmody. Andrew took the BBC team to Nostell Priory, home of Louisa Winn, where the National Trust curator displayed the 1818 Broadwood piano and allowed Matthew to pluck a string on the harp. Steph and Kirsten went to Newcastle’s quayside to visit Bessie Surtees House, dating from the mid 17th century, where the magnificent reception rooms help us imagine the spaces where Henry Atkinson may have made music, and from where his grandson John Scott would elope in 1772 with the daughter of a Newcastle banker.  

In making the series we learned how the radio team paint the scenes through sound. Natalie incorporated sounds of the environment such as the clock chimes at Mileham church or the babbling chalk stream in Richard Pyle’s village of Nether Wallop. She recorded the sounds of documents being unfurled and pages turned in the archive. Matthew vividly described the places we were visiting and the experience of opening the sources in the archive, capturing details such as the archival boxes and ribbons that hold these items together, and the colour and texture of the bindings. We are grateful to the archivists who allowed us and the BBC team access to sources or spaces not usually open to the public. In Norfolk we recorded in the strongroom of the record office, and at Northumberland Archives, Kirsten and Steph were allowed a rare glimpse of Henry Atkinson’s book, which is usually deemed too fragile to be viewed.

Kirsten Gibson, Matthew Bannister and Steph Carter examining Henry Atkinson’s tunebook (1694) in Northumberland Archives

The series highlights the diverse lives of the women and men associated with these music books in local archives. The episode on Cornwall focuses on Eleanor Morgan of St Erth, one of the locals investigated by Caro whose books or transcriptions of carols were obtained by the collector Davies Gilbert (or Giddy) as material for his Some ancient Christmas carols, with the tunes to which they were formerly sung in the West of England (1822). In Norfolk, the Mileham Singers’ Book of 1795 contains the names of the twelve singers and two instrumentalists in the church band, and we used the 1814 enclosure maps of the parish to place some of these musicians in the landscape, locating their cottages and smallholdings. For Hales Hall in Norfolk, Nancy performed the ballad discovered and transcribed by Caro recounting the anger of a woman of the Hobart family ousted from her home around 1638.  

Nancy’s creative interpretations focus on tunes that show the web of interconnections within and beyond English vernacular music. For Cornwall, Nancy performed the carol ‘Hark, hark what news the angels bring’ found in Eleanor Morgan’s book, drawing attention to versions of this carol found in Sheffield and also in Australia (likely brought there by emigrant families of Cornish miners) For Louisa Winn’s music book, Nancy picked the ‘Danse Canadienne’ supplied by a ‘Miss Anderson’, which hints at the family’s global connections across the then British empire. Back in Hampshire, Nancy’s set from Richard Pyle’s tunebook highlighted the blurrings between secular and sacred, given that Pyle’s book contains dance tunes for recreation and also psalms and hymns for Sundays in Nether Wallop church. Nancy framed her set of dance tunes with Pyle’s Evening Hymn—a version of Tallis’s Canon, but retexted by Nancy with words describing the natural environment of the Test Valley in Hampshire.  

Eight weeks after our recording sessions, we’re now hearing the broadcasts and admiring Natalie’s alchemy in editing and drawing together our conversations interspersed with the soundtracks from the Melrose Quartet.  You can catch the series on the links from our Media page, where you’ll also find links to videos of the full tracks recorded by the Melrose Quartet. We hope the series shows how the musical past can intertwine with our present-day experiences of a range of places across England.  

The series is available on BBC Sounds: BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, The Song Detectorists