Black British Folk Collective (BBFC) | Recipient of the 2026 grant
The Black British Folk Collective (BBFC) is a new collective founded by musicians and artists Angeline Morrison, Bianca Wilson, and Marcus MacDonald. Together, they seek to centre Black narratives in British folk, and to nurture folk’s existing Black community. With the support of the Ffern Folk Foundation, the BBFC will lead and organise the UK’s first in-person folk club for Black, BPOC and Global Majority participants. Marking the equinoxes and solstices, these quarterly events will provide spaces for the diaspora to share in the joy of folk.
In Discussion
Can you describe who you are, and tell us a little bit about the BBFC?
We are a group of three Black British Folk musicians and activists (Marcus MacDonald, Bianca Wilson, Angeline Morrison) that spreads outwards to include the community of all Britain’s overlooked Black, Brown and Global Majority folk singers, musicians, dancers, storytellers, crafters and other folkies who may feel unrepresented or excluded from the wider folk scene. We believe in the quiet healing power of folk. We believe that folk creates vitalising moments of community and connection.
We know that Black, Brown and other Global Majority Folkies have always been involved in folk. We are building something that did not begin with us. The movement is already in motion, we simply step into its current, to tend it, to nurture it, to help it grow.
It’s a sad fact that many Black, Brown and POC people feel out of place in the spaces where folk happens, or feel that folk isn’t really for them. We want to share the joy of British folk with our communities, to encourage them to feel included, and to know that folk is very much something that is for them. For us.
"We know that Black, Brown and other Global Majority Folkies have always been involved in folk. We are building something that did not begin with us."
Why do you think it’s more important now than ever, to centre the experience and narratives of BPOC within the world of British Folk?
Division is not a new thing, and every era has its own version of it. The Black British Folk Collective is a presence that thrives on collectivity, community and communion. We recognise that togetherness in community is the way forward. We believe that folklore, folk song, folk music and folk crafts are powerful forces for community, togetherness and union. Black people have always been involved with these things, and always will be. BBFC brings us together to celebrate diasporic visions of Old and New Albion.
We gather to remake the stories around Folk, to widen the circle, and to move with intention toward a future where folk practices belong to all who feel called to them.
"We believe that folklore, folk song, folk music and folk crafts are powerful forces for community, togetherness and union. Black people have always been involved with these things, and always will be."
Despite its rich and complex heritage, BPOC participation within British folk is often written out of the record. Are there any songs, stories, or practitioners who really inspire you and you believe should be better known?
There are so many! Billy Waters (d.1823), a street musician hero of the Black and Disabled communities, Cy Grant, the Guyanese actor and musician who established the Drum Arts Centre in London in the 1970s, and who from 1958 also sang a nightly ‘topical Calypso’ on the BBC’s Tonight programme, Nadia Cattouse (also from Guyana), Dorris Henderson, John Blanke who was one of King Henry VIII’s royal trumpeters - these are just the first few that come to mind. There are so many more.
With the support of the Ffern Folk Foundation, you will be able to organise the first regular folk club centred around BPOC. Can you expand a little on the ambition of this, and what you hope it will provide for the community?
The BPOC Folk Club is going to be magical. We aim to hold four events each year, to align with the solstices and equinoxes as the world turns.
Community is everything, but there is a lot of isolation for us in the folk world - we are present, and these Folk Clubs will hopefully provide moments where we can all be in the same place at the same time. The Black British Folk Takeover at Cecil Sharp House, which Angeline curated for The EFDSS, showed us that there is such a desire for this kind of Folk Club right now.
It’s exciting to be able to create these spaces, and encourage others to create their own BPOC folk activities and spaces, wherever they are. We hope that the BPOC folk clubs will encourage our community to self-organise more regularly, with the dream of these sessions becoming monthly or even more frequent. We are kickstarting a movement.
The culmination of this first year will be a BBFC Festival on LION land. Can you tell us a little about the festival and LION?
Land is so important to our collective vision, it’s fundamental to how we interact with each other and with folk. Land in Our Names (LION) is a grassroots collective of Black and People of Colour getting land through reparations, whose work addresses the inequalities in access to land and food.
Marcus is also part of the LION collective and we have already collaborated with them last summer when Bianca and Marcus held our first BPOC folk club on their land project at the Glegall Wharf permaculture garden in Burgess park in south London. We will be hosting the BBFC Mini folk fest on the LION land, there will be performances from members of the BBFC collective and our community, ritual and ancestral veneration, folk art workshop, folk dance, masquerade, folk medicine and food growing workshops.
Interview by Daniel Farnham. Images courtesy of BBFC.