Upcoming Events
Keep an eye on our gigs page, or sign up to our emailing list. You can hear and see some of our previous performances on our Youtube page.
Morris Folk Club
Our Folk Club is on the last Tuesday of the month, 7.30pm-10.30pm-ish. More information on the Morris Folk Club page.
Morris Folk Club is usually held at The Betsey Trotwood (56 Farringdon Road EC1R 3BL). Usually upstairs, sometimes downstairs, sometimes elsewhere - do check social media or sign up to our...
Sign up to our emailing list to receive occasional Mailchimp newsletters with news and info from Morris Folk Choir, including Morris Folk Club info and online invites. (See some previous emails here, to get an idea of what you might expect.)
More About Us
More About Us
Our Songs
Since 2008, led by choir director Michelle Woolfenden, we have been coming together from all over London to learn and sing folk songs of all kinds - murder ballads, protest songs, work songs, sea-shanties, love melodies, folkified non-folk songs, and good old knees-up tunes, from all across the centuries and from all over the world.
Our repertoire reflects the inclusive, internationalist, outward-looking nature of folk music: treasuring songs which have their roots in the tradition of local and national communities but which belong to anyone and everyone, embracing songs from one another's traditions, and understanding that anything that has roots is living, growing and changing.
Our Voices
We learn tunes and harmonies by ear - an ability to read music is not required. We range from seasoned singers to those who hadn't sung since school, and from folk devotees to those who didn't know much about folk songs before.
We sing with a full range of voices from low to high. We sing in a variety of arrangements, from unison through two-part harmony up to six or more parts.
We are flexible in our part-groups and combinations of voices; we are not a formal soprano-alto-tenor-bass (SATB) structure, and people sing in different parts in different songs, depending on what suits their voice and what the arrangement needs. We go to a part in a song where our voice takes us rather than any fixed SATB definition.
And different voices take the tunes and harmonies in different songs: the highest voices don't always get the tune, and nor are the lowest voices relegated to just going 'dum dum dum'.
Our Instruments
At our heart is unaccompanied singing, but we also sing with accompaniment. We draw on instruments played by choir members, in different combinations for different songs. Our ever-expanding instrumental arsenal includes banjo, guitar, fiddle, accordion, concertina, harmonica, mandolin, ukelele, recorder, whistle, cello, shruti box, bodhran, pandeiro and more. Out of this accompaniment has grown The Horace Mouse Band, which plays regularly at our folk club and has also played for our ceilidh.
Interested In Joining?
Our choir is currently pretty full - there are about thirty of us, which is a size which works well for us - but if you can sing (or would like to), and/or can play an accompanying folk instrument, contact us to check how things stand at the moment.
If you aren't able to be part of the choir for now, everyone is welcome at our Morris Folk Club, we always encourage people interested in the choir to come along to folk club, where they will get an idea of what we're like and what we're about...
(We are active online and on social media, and in public performance, so choir members should expect to appear in publicly-shared photos and audio/video recordings of the choir.)