Once Fay had the brilliant idea to echo the @FolkloreThurs group with a weekly Twitter event exploring folk songs she needed a team of people to keep it going each week. Of course, the real people who keep it going are the excellent bunch who tune in and post their own ideas but there are a small band of us who set the themes and are there every Tuesday to get things started and repost what appears. We thought you might be interested to get to know a little bit about the people behind the hashtags.

Fay Hield is a folk singer and an academic at the University of Sheffield, teaching ethnomusicology and music management. Her research includes looking at the English folk scene to discover how it builds a sense of community, how artists play with traditional materials and how audiences receive them. This work inspired the formation of Soundpost – a safe space to introduce people to the weird and wonderful folk scene and a place for singers and musicians to explore and develop how we do what we do. Alongside the research, Fay tours and records with various projects, including The Full English and her own band, The Hurricane Party.

Kirsty Hannah is a singer with a particular interest in researching and singing songs from her native Lincolnshire. In 2016 she pursued an MA in Traditional Music of the British Isles and through this she became part of the TradSongTues team. Kirsty is a resident singer at Grimsby Folk Club and performs regularly at other events and festivals. Aside from music and singing, Kirsty enjoys hiking and birdwatching.

Hailing from the Pennine town of Rochdale, Nicola Beazley moved to Sheffield to start a PhD. Nicola is an Ethnomusicologist whose predominant research interest is in the English Folk Scene and its contemporary traditions. Nicola's research area compliments and informs her performance career. She tours the U.K, Canada and America in the accordion and fiddle duo Alex Cumming and Nicola Beazley, and has released two albums Across the water and Live from Toronto, and has a second album in the pipeline.

Nicola also performs with the Sheffield based Rosie Hood trio, headlining many of the top folk festival stages in the country and on the BBC Radio 2 Folk Show. Nicola's most recent venture has seen her start out as a solo instrumentalist, and was awarded the Creative Seed Bursary by EFDSS, enabling her to release her debut solo E.P, Echoes, to high acclaim, featuring new compositions and work with brass band music. It offers an unique fusion of traditional instrumental music.

Nicola is also a highly sought-after educator. Specialising in English folk fiddle and creative musicianship, Nicola offers a wide-ranging level of community music tuition, from beginners to advanced, from children to adults. Nicola has a great deal of teaching experience in a lot of settings from individual, in school teaching, to group teaching at many of the top festivals.

Jenna Walker is a musician and singer with a love of folk music and especially old songs. After several years teaching and playing many types of music other than folk she returned to the genre in 2013 and then pursued an MA in Traditional Music of the British Isles at Sheffield University the following year. In 2016 she formed the duo ‘Cambridge and Walker’ with singer and guitarist David Cambridge. They are well known in the folk clubs of East Anglia and released their first album, Wheel and Dive, in March this year. The love of performing and researching folk music has led to a post study involvement in Fay’s Soundpost and TradSongTues projects, including curating the exhibition for the fabulous Modern Fairies project last year. Jenna is currently enjoying a sabbatical; reimagining an old garden in her new home in Suffolk, creating new music with the duo and wondering where life may go next.

Andy McMillan has always had a love of traditional music, playing guitar and singing in social settings, focussing on Scottish and Irish song. In more recent years, and inspired by the excellent English traditional scene, he further developed a passion for English traditional music and now also plays melodeon. (his Castagnari Dony being his pride and joy). He had a rather fine time studying Traditional Music of the British Isles at the excellent Sheffield University. Andy plays and sings in a folk duo, frequenting the odd folk club and session around Yorkshire and the North East, performing English, Scottish and Irish songs and tunes.