Martyn Wyndham-Read lived and worked in Australia from 1958 to 1967 and was a regular visitor to the country.
11 Facts About Martyn Wyndham-Read
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Martyn Wyndham-Read grew up on a Sussex farm; he heard the village blacksmith singing local songs.
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Martyn Wyndham-Read performed them at rural pubs, and decided to learn more about them and where they came from.
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Martyn Wyndham-Read initially moved to Sydney and then to Melbourne to join the folk song revival during the early 1960s.
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Martyn Wyndham-Read is helped in this by a voice which rarely wavers from the pitch; but folk singing is a subtle art, and just having a good voice is not enough.
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Martyn Wyndham-Read's style is polished and rounded, full-blown almost, yet it escapes the theatricality which seems to creep into the work of some of our classically-trained folk singers.
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Martyn Wyndham-Read returned to England in 1967 and met up with singer and song collector, Bert Lloyd, who had spent time in Australia.
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Martyn Wyndham-Read was asked by Lloyd to contribute to an album, Leviathan, on the Topic label.
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Martyn Wyndham-Read was the instigator of the Song Links Project, these are two-book-and-CD sets which celebrate English traditional songs and their Australian variants, and Song Links 2 compares and contrasts English traditional songs with versions that have travelled over the Atlantic and been sung in North America with a cast of folk performers representing the cream of singers specialising in traditional songs from their own country.
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Martyn Wyndham-Read was working in 2010 with Shirley Collins and Pip Barnes on Down the Lawson Track featuring stories, poems and songs of the Australian poet, Henry Lawson.
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Martyn Wyndham-Read has produced over 40 albums and appeared at folk festivals in Australia, and around the world.