Alan Whitbread – The Biography

My first love is for traditional English song & music but my repertoire also includes some great songs from other traditions and more recent compositions. While I learnt my trade as an unaccompanied singer, I now also relish playing on one of my English concertinas, both on its own and accompanying my singing.

I enjoy the formality of singing at festivals & folk clubs and I am happy to go a long way for my singing: for instance, at Easter 2007, I sang at the Canterbury Folk Festival in Christchurch, New Zealand. Not only that, I relish the rough & tumble of singing in pubs, where I mostly perform well-known songs, such as Lincolnshire Poacher, Drunken Sailor, My Grandfather’s Clock and You are My Sunshine. I have also played cabaret spots at formal dinners, singing such rousing songs as Jerusalem, Swing Low Sweet Chariot and Over the Hills and Far Away. In addition, I have performed English song & music at junior schools, playing & singing a mixture of traditional English tunes & songs and talking about English folk traditions, such as morris dancing and mummers plays.

I love singing sea songs & shanties, being a member of the Shellback Chorus and the now defunked shanty crew, Navy Cut. I have sung at folk & maritime festivals all over the UK, as far apart as Edinburgh, Lancaster, Great Yarmouth and Portsmouth, as well as in Holland, New Zealand and the USA.

My interest in morris dancing has meant that I am a member of several teams. In recent years this has led me to play and sing at large international festivals in China, Estonia, Inner Mongolia, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey, Ukraine and the USA.

The English concertinas I play are my pride and joy, being a Lachenal Tenor/Treble Edeophone with metal ends dated c1920 and a Wheatstone Baritone with wooden ends dated c1903.