To buy a copy go to Gott Discs, they are doing a Christmas special price on the complete collection. Go and treat yourself or your fellow folk lover!

Click here for the Songs

Folk Radio UK recommends:The Christmas Special

A special album of ‘songs only’ from the BBC Radio 2 documentary series The 2006 Radio Ballads – a stand-alone companion piece to the six-CD Radio Ballads collection which has been released over the past quarter by Gott Discs.

The documentary series was built on interviews about issues of our time – hunting with hounds, the decline of the steel and shipbuilding industries, living with HIV/AIDS, the lives of the showmen and women of the travelling fairgrounds and how music attempted to heal Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

The songs were inspired by and written from accounts of actual life experience, and speech and song were interwoven to create a rarely-attempted self-narrating storytelling style in the Ballads.

Musical Director John Tams and series music producer Andy Seward have gone back and stripped out the speech so the songs stand alone in their own right. The twenty songs on this album have been drawn from across the Ballads series and represent just one-third of the songs specially commissioned for this remarkable and critically acclaimed radio series.

    * Performances by Kate Rusby, Cara Dillon, Tommy Sands, Karine Polwart, Jez Lowe, John Tams, Julie Matthews, Chris While, Bob Fox, Barry Coope, Kellie While, Lester Simpson, Martin Simpson and Michael McGoldrick.
    * Musical backing from the finest names in folk music, aka The Radio Ballads Band (whistle and fiddle: John McCusker, accordion: Andy Cutting, bass: Andy Seward, guitar: Graeme Taylor)

NB: The 2006 Radio Ballads were first broadcast on BBC Radio 2 between February and April 2006 and took their inspiration from the Radio Ballads made by folk singer Ewan MacColl and BBC producer Charles Parker for the BBC in the 1950s and 1960s. The original Ballads are widely considered masterpieces of radio, weaving direct personal experience with songs written from and about the tales told.

Gott Discs sent me the whole set so I will be playing the Radio Ballads here on Folk Radio UK...it is a masterpiece!