Our life narratives are punctuated by songs. Hearing a song from the past can awaken emotional memories of places, experiences, and people. The role of song in forming bonds between human beings is the theme that resonates most strongly and consistently through the pages of this deep and dense work of theory and exemplification. This book is as much a cultural history of traditional songs (mainly from England, Scotland, Ireland, and North America) as it is a book about the sociolinguistics of song more generally. It is an impressive resource for folk musicians, cultural theorists, and sociolinguists alike, and provides a welcome exploration into historical and current aspects of folk song performance and transmission, the timeless stories that folk songs tell, and the communities they build.

Ambitious in theoretical scope, the authors richly and exhaustively exemplify their points with links to recordings of folk songs that bring the discussion to life. By ‘listening along’ with the content being discussed, the reader is invited into a discourse community of folk song in which the authors are clearly enmeshed. Through their insider status, the authors are able to illustrate their ideas with personal stories. The book begins with a ‘Preface’ in which Franz Andres Morrissey recounts how he met Richard J. Watts at a Swiss Folk Festival in 1974, and the development of their musical and intellectual friendship. In chapter 2, Watts illustrates the concept of relational performance through a reminiscence about the spontaneous eruption of group singing during a dinner for the festival's organisers and invited musicians. In chapter 8, Andres Morrissey shares an anecdote about giving a performance that included both lecture and song, showing how a range of voices ‘vie with each other for various degrees of prominence at different times in the performance’ (206).

Another personal touch is the inclusion of original recordings of folk songs performed by Watts and Andres Morrissey themselves. These recordings are a highlight of the book, and certainly lend credibility to the authors’ dual membership in both the academic and the folk song discourse communities. Unfortunately, it seems that the publisher never finished setting up what the authors refer to as ‘the website’. To find the supplementary materials, navigate to multimediafluids.uam.elogim.com/watts (this link appears on the back cover of the hardback, but nowhere inside the text), scroll down to find the ‘Resources’ tab, and then click ‘Resources’ again. This leads to a set of files, including a MS word document, which the authors seem to have expected would be formatted and hosted. The document contains a full transcript of a concert that is referred to in several chapters, and links to over a hundred songs discussed in the book. I highly recommend that readers engage with the examples as they read. It is one thing to consider the theory of folk performance on its own, and quite another to contextualise these ideas by experiencing the music.

There is a lot of material in this book—lengthy chunks are devoted to collecting, comparing, and describing the large canon of folk songs, while these songs are used to develop a sociolinguistic ‘model’ of folk song performance. Despite careful study, I never had the sense of a unified ‘model’ per se, but rather a collection of continua (the continuum of performance types ranging from relational to representational, p. 65), lists (five characteristics that define performance, p. 54; ten performance contexts, pp. 62–63; twelve characteristics of folk song sessions, pp. 71–77), and principles (three principles for tracking the history of folk songs, pp. 119–21). Building on the historical linguistic concept of the actuation process, their presentation of the transmission process (117) comes closer to a fully fleshed out model of how song elements change over time, but this is just one element of a much wider network of ideas that make up the argumentation of the book as a whole. It is the drawing together of an impressive array of concepts from sociolinguistics and further afield, and the application of these to folk song performance, that characterises the book's unique contribution.

Given the scope of this review, I can only mention a few themes that struck me as the most novel or important. In chapter 2, Hymes’ (Reference Hymes1981) work on the breakthrough into performance is developed in the discussion of how keying-in and keying-out frame the performance mode. The authors argue that these stretches of speech have also become enregistered as ‘folk talk’ (chapter 11), serving to connect with the audience, to contextualise the song, and to authenticate the singer's credibility by referring to their place within ‘the tradition’. As well as covering other familiar territory on the sociolinguistics of performance (e.g. Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990), the authors draw together a number of fresh and insightful approaches, for example, by reviewing the work of Victor Turner (e.g. Turner Reference Turner1987), who views performance as ritualised social drama that is ‘created and conventionalised as unreality in the shape of reality’ (53). Turner's work is largely missing from discussions of stylisation in performance (such as Coupland Reference Coupland2007; Gibson Reference Gibson2011), and may have much to offer.

The authors’ focus on the role of ritual in performance is an important theme. Most sociolinguists will be unfamiliar with Gamble's (Reference Gamble2012) notion of the oval of performance, described by the authors as ‘the symbolic container in which ritual events involving song and dance are played out’ (36). Whether the container is a concert hall or a circle in the dirt created by dancing feet, ‘all ritual performances take place in contained spaces… and in the absence of a material container the activity of singing helps to construct containment and, through that containment, the assertion of a social group’ (35). The relevance of ritual is motivated in the book's prologue (chapter 1), where the authors argue for the centrality of song to human experience, taking on Mithen's (Reference Mithen2005) claim that song preceded language in human evolution. In this view, song has always served an important (and adaptive) ritual function: to bond individuals together into communities.

Watts and Andres Morrissey's definition of folk song ‘differs radically from all other attempts at a definition’ (3), and is presented as follows.

Beyond this defining feature, a ‘genuine’ folk performance is ‘embedded in a tradition’, ‘adopts a critical stance’, relies on ‘the singer's sincerity and credibility’, ‘goes beyond entertainment’ (2), and ‘is not commercially motivated’ (109). The authors are careful to critique notions of folk song authenticity that require a song to stay the same over long periods of time (chapter 6). Instead, authenticity is achieved by ‘making songs speak meaningfully and emotionally in the emergent event of performance to contemporary audiences’ (157). Songs from any genre can be used as folk songs if they are ‘easy to learn, undemanding to accompany and if they stimulate communal singing’ (90). Folk song performance is thus defined by a function that song can perform, rather than with reference to musical genre. The independence of a song's musical style from its situated function is an important point, and the authors could have explored this issue in greater depth. The book contains very little discussion of cases where a commercial song ‘takes on the function of a “folk song”' (68), and conversely, cases where songs in the ‘folk idiom’ (110) are performed primarily for commercial rather than community-building purposes.

One of the book's central concepts (introduced in chapter 2) is the continuum from relational (impromptu, co-participant oriented) to representational (rehearsed, audience oriented) types of performance. ‘The defining feature of a representational performance is the “stage”' (60), ‘and as we move along this continuum, the importance of a “stage” becomes more significant’ (59). This distinction provides a parallel in folk song performance to Coupland's (Reference Coupland2007) distinction between ‘mundane’ and ‘high’ performance, and Bell & Gibson's (Reference Bell and Gibson2011) distinction between ‘everyday’ and ‘staged’ performance. In some sense, mass media is the ultimate stage since it represents the greatest spatial and social distance between the audience and the performer. Drawing on Bell's (Reference Bell1984) audience design framework, the authors describe how recorded media turn ‘an audience’ into ‘listeners’ (see Figure 2.5, p. 67, and Figure 10.1, p. 270). This is a useful distinction. The kinds of experience we have today as listeners (not as audience) are different to the community bonding experiences at the heart of this book.

The solitary yet intimate relationship between a listener and a distant pop star is a world away from the more relational musical experiences described by Watts and Andres Morrissey. There are areas of the human experience with song that thus fall outside the scope of this book. That said, the analyses here provide a great deal of weighty conceptual scaffolding that will help to structure other researchers’ ideas about the sociolinguistics of song.

Since Trudgill's (Reference Trudgill1983) study of the adoption of American accent features by The Beatles and other British musicians in the 1960s and 1970s, a growing number of researchers have explored the place indexicalities of sung dialects in popular music (Simpson Reference Simpson1999; Beal Reference Beal2009; Gibson & Bell Reference Gibson, Bell, Hernández-Campoy and Cutillas-Espinosa2012), including Andres Morrissey's own (Reference Andres Morrissey, Locher and Strässler2008) discussion of how a preference for sonorous segments affects singing accents (recapitulated on p. 272). Chapter 10 provides a case study that enriches this body of literature. By studying a single song, ‘Billy Grey’, as performed by a range of artists, the authors are able to bring together some of the book's key themes, illustrating the roles of adopters and adapters that were introduced in chapter 5, and discussing the choices that singers must face in adopting sources. While a Canadian version of the song follows the genre of the original (producing a North American, but not a Canadian accent), interpretations from Ireland and Scotland ‘claim’ the song, adapting it to their own musical (and dialect) styles. The discussion of recorded song in chapter 10 differs from preceding chapters, where analyses focus on lyrics and melodies acquired from broadsheets and the archives of song collectors. Chapter 7 discusses the issues faced (before sound recording existed) when trans-mediating these historical songs from ephemeral sound to written form.

By exploring the past, this book reminds us that the global music industry and the recording technologies that enabled it are relatively recent. Much has changed in the world of music in the 140 or so years since the advent of the phonograph and the unprecedented level of song commodification that followed. Spanning several centuries of folk song performance, Language, the Singer and the Song is steeped in a longer history of folk song and reminds us that the relationships between humans and songs, and the relationships between humans, through song, are a core part of the human story.