Last week we had another exciting development on the Souling project as we welcomed a new artist into the fold.
Wendy Smith is an electronic musician who has recently been studying at Liverpool Hope University under reknowned composer Manuela Blackburn. She has been highly commended for her compositions and we are thrilled that she has agreed to come and create a brand new piece of music for this project.
Wendy will be attending workshops across the project including our sessions at the Rustic Festival in July and will be collecting sounds from the young people and community members who we will be working with. Alongside this field recording she will be using the archival recordings of historical Souling plays that we have found through our research and using all this material to create a sonic art piece that we will share at our final performances in the Autumn.

On April 30th Lead Researchers Mike and Chris went to meet a lady names Angela and her mother Phyllis who had responded to a piece in the Congleton Chronicle about our project. Phyllis lives on a farm in Swettenham, a small village on the outskirts of Congleton that is mentioned alongside the larger town in the 'Other' section  of our Helm text.
Phyllis's father was a performer of the local Soul Play and a recording was made of him in 1953/4 singing and playing one of the key songs from the play by Peter Kennedy, an important figure in the history of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.
The Swettenham play, as recorded in part on this piece of archive footage features several characters that are different to the core text of the Antrobus play on which most seem to be based, meaning that here, we have found some original information that is not actually recorded in the Helm text!

Mike and Chris will be heading back to Swettenham in a few weeks to speak again with Phyllis and take some photographs of some of the items that she still has from her father's collection.