Chris Foster is singer and guitar accompanist; he grew up in Somerset in the south west of England, where he first heard and started singing folk songs. Since 2000, he performs traditional Icelandic music with Bára Grímsdóttir. As this year's NHM is centered around ballads and ballads happen to be Chris' specialisation, he can give a workshop with folk ballads from England, many of which have close parallels in Scandinavia and indeed the whole of Europe (see Francis Child's monumental collection "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads").

Chris tells about the British material, which he performs with voice and guitar:
"While I sing and play quite a few ballads, I use guitar as my weapon of choice and actually do a pretty big percentage a capella. Archive ´field´recordings from the past 100 years or so (which I can easily play examples of), all have people singing ballads unaccompanied. I would be happy to describe / demonstrate the way(s) I work with traditional source material to make the versions of the songs I sing."
Of course, most field collections of European balladry have been made from a capella singers, often from seniors without much voice left. Nevertheless, this does not impede us from using the traditional material with our own voices, and/or with musical instruments of our choice.
Chris will play some archive recordings to illustrate some points, and he suggests: "I think it could be quite an interactive discussion type format with people all putting in ideas about how we go about dealing with / accompanying this material in a contemporary context."

All voices and instruments are welcome!

... By the way, the Scandinavian unspecific usage of the word "harp" includes guitars too. One example is a guy from Northern Sweden named Lorenz Teophran Falk (1826-1868) who was called "mannen med harpan" (=the man with the harp), while his instruments were, in fact, guitar and voice.