Ian Russell obituary: The scholar who spent decades researching Yorkshire folk songs
Ian Russell, who has died at 79, was a scholar and cultural researcher who specialised in, and was considered an authority on, the particular singing traditions of South Yorkshire and the Peak District.
He conceived the biennial Festival of Village Carols in Sheffield in 1994 and remained its director, selecting the guest groups, the carols to be sung and supervising the musical arrangements.
The songs themselves had been passed down through the generations and performed during the Christmas period in dozens of pubs to the north and west of Sheffield.
The festival was based on decades of research on his part, beginning in 1969 when he set off exploring the suburbs and villages in the Pennine foothills.
In 1977, while also working as a teacher, he completed a part-time PhD through the Institute of Dialect and Folklife Studies at Leeds University, discovering that individual Sheffield communities took a proprietorial interest in carols they believed to be ‘theirs’ and which differed strikingly to the familiar Victortian anthems sung elsewhere.
He made recordings of intensely local performances, copies of which are now in the sound archive of the British Library.
Between 1980 and 1993 he was editor of Folk Music Journal, published by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, and in 1998 he helped convene a conference on the subject at Sheffield University.
He later became director of the Elphinstone Institute at Aberdeen University, a post he held until he retired in 2014.
Also a long-standing member of the American Folklore Society, he gave the Benjamin Botkin lecture at the US Library of Congress in 2014 and curated a CD of village carols for the Smithsonian Institute record label.
In 2016, Russell was named a ‘Point of Light’ in a community awards scheme initiated by then Prime Minister Theresa May. An MBE followed in 2020.
He is survived by his wife Norma (née Carter), whom he married in 1967, and by their son and grandson.