Fay Hield

Fay Hield, a folk performer and scholar raised in West Yorkshire, appeared marked from childhood for work rooted in traditional song. Her father’s performances at the storied Bacca Pipes Folk Club in Keighley brought her and her sister into the circle of its members after their mother’s death, creating ties of shared heritage and belonging that later shaped her path. While completing a Bachelor of Music in folk and traditional music at Newcastle University, she helped launch the a cappella quartet the Witches of Elswick in 2001. After the group ended its run six years later, Hield withdrew from the folk world for several years. She reentered performing in 2009, having settled on the edge of Sheffield with her partner, folk musician Jon Boden, and formed a trio with Rob Habron of English Acoustic Collective and Bellowhead’s Sam Sweeney that specialized in seldom-heard traditional pieces. Topic Records issued her debut album, Looking Glass, in 2010, a collection that merged traditional songs and ballads. The same year she received her Ph.D. from Sheffield University for research on English folk singing and the building of community. Her second album, Orfeo, arrived in 2012 and featured backing from the Hurricane Party, whose members included Jon Boden, Rob Habron, Sam Sweeney, Andy Cutting, and Martin Simpson. Also in 2012 she began lecturing in music at the University of Sheffield, concentrating on folk music and its part in forming communities. The following year she assisted in assembling the folk supergroup the Full English, created to mark the English Folk Song and Dance Society’s unification of its song collections through the development of the most extensive searchable database of British folk songs, tunes, dances, and customs. After the supergroup toured for two years, Hield turned again to her own recordings and, once more using the Hurricane Party as her core band, enlisted additional players from the Full English for the 2016 album Old Adam.