Ian Russell obituary

Folklorist and scholar regarded as a leading authority on the carol singing traditions of South Yorkshire and Derbyshire The folklorist, folk song scholar and former director of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen, Ian Russell, who has died aged 79, was the foremost authority on the local carol singing traditions in South Yorkshire and Derbyshire. These carols never include Away in a Manger and are rarely sung in church. They generally date from a period before Victorian church reformers adopted Hymns Ancient and Modern and did away with church bands. Instead, the bands and singers took the carols into the pubs and often maintained a peripatetic tour of the local community. When Ian started his fieldwork in 1970, he found 83 pubs to the west and north of Sheffield where the singing took place in the weeks before Christmas. He learned how the carols had been passed on orally through the generations, sometimes with the aid of family manuscripts. As an enthusiastic participant observer, he set about documenting the tradition and researching its history, and that of Derbyshire, where similar carols were sung, often in chapels. Ian’s recordings of the carols, made in