AFS Fellow Steve Roud Awarded Honorary Degree by The Open University

Steve Roud is best known as the creator of the Roud Indexes: an extraordinarily comprehensive record of traditional English-language folk songs from around the world. Roud is a librarian, indexer and historian of folk songs, whose passion for documenting and cataloguing the genre has transformed both scholarly research and popular understanding. He is also an International Fellow of the American Folklore Society.

The Folk Song Index records key details of traditional songs in English, and features a comprehensive numbering system, called ‘Roud numbers’, to identify and bring together variants of songs across time and place. This is essential in a field where there are many different renditions of songs and no single, definitive version of them. For instance, clicking on Roud 12 in the Folk Song Index, Scarborough Fair, will take you to 355 entries detailing the song’s different titles and versions, and citing evidence of the song, and its performance, in myriad sources.

Because of its size and reach, the Index allows researchers to undertake comparative studies, chart song histories, investigate the role of women as performers, and many other aspects of vernacular culture. The Folk Song Index sits alongside Steve’s Broadside Index, which documents songs in cheap printed formats and early recordings, which are essential to understanding the sources and histories of vernacular song.

The Roud Indexes began life around 1970 on a series of index cards kept in a shoebox and were eventually transferred to Steve’s personal computer. More than 50 years later, there are over three quarters of a million entries, linking thousands of songs, from Australia to the Americas, as well as the British Isles. Today, the Roud Indexes are hosted online by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at the English Folk Dance and Song Society and are available free of charge. They are an indispensable resource for researchers of all kinds around the world, utilised by academics, practitioners and enthusiasts alike.

Marion Bowman, another AFS International Fellow and Professor Emerita of Vernacular Religion at The Open University, along with ethnomusicologist Professor Byron Dueck (also of The Open University) worked together with Steve’s daughter Kate Faulkner and longterm collaborator Dr Julia Bishop (Sheffield University) to propose Steve for the honorary degree of Doctor of the University; all were delighted that the nomination was successful.

On October 30, 2025, in a Graduation Ceremony at the Birmingham Symphony Hall, Marion made the Oration in Steve’s honour, and the degree was presented by Open University Chancellor, Baroness Martha Lane-Fox of Soho.