Posted by Louise Parmakis 20 June 2010
24 June 2010 (midsummer’s day) sees the start of UK Folk Singer of the Year 2010 Jon Boden’s ambitious new project “A Folk Song A Day”.
Unaccompanied social singing, once the domain of public houses throughout the land, is now largely confined to football grounds and places of worship. In an effort to redress the balance, in his new project Jon will be releasing a new version of a traditional folk song each and every day for a year.
In his own words, Jon says “The main idea behind afolksongaday.com is to try and do my bit for raising the profile of unaccompanied social singing. Most of the songs on the site are songs that I have sung for years but rarely on stage and never on album. I have always thought of myself as first and foremost an unaccompanied singer so it was quite a shock to me to realise that, although I have now made 10 albums, I have never included a solo unaccompanied track on any of them.
It seemed high time I rectified that situation and afolksongaday.com is an opportunity for me to record my whole repertoire of songs without worrying about making any of them commercial, stylistically original, or fitting them in to a particular album concept.”
The new songs will be streamed on Jon’s dedicated website - afolksongaday.com - and will also be available as a free podcast from iTunes every day. Fans will be able to subscribe and get each song downloaded automatically.
They will be available for the whole month, and at the end of each month Navigator Records will release a digital album of that months songs, in an effort to create a unique, traditional folk song resource for future generations.
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