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.
