The Living Tradition
The Living Tradition was a bi-monthly music magazine published in the United Kingdom between 1993 and 2022, specialising in traditional folk music from Britain, Ireland and beyond. Based in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, in Scotland, with an Irish office in Ardara, County Donegal, it was regarded as an independent and authoritative voice in the folk and traditional music scene, and as a definitive guide to that scene for performers, organisers and listeners. In issue 144, dated June and July 2022, the editor announced that after issue 145 the magazine would no longer be published, bringing a twenty-nine-year run to a close.
Foundations in folk clubs and festivals
The Living Tradition did not begin as a conventional publishing venture. Its founders, Pete and Heather Heywood, had been involved in running Kilmarnock Folk Club in the 1970s and later in the Girvan Folk Festival. By the early 1990s Girvan was at its peak and demanding to organise, and Pete Heywood faced a choice between concentrating on his day job and making a complete break to work in folk music full-time. A festival alone was too small to support full-time management, so he explored starting a folk development agency.
With others, he created Inform, on the principle that the best way to promote interest in music was to point people towards live music experiences of their own. The magazine grew from that agency impulse, and from an older Scottish folk newsletter tradition. Its roots lay in the Sandy Bells Broadsheet, the newsletter of the Scottish folk scene guided by Ian Green, John Barrow and journalist Ken Thomson, which later continued as The Broadsheet under Jack Foley and then as The Scottish Folk Gazette under Jock Brown and Gill Bowman. When Brown wished to pass on the baton, Pete Heywood took on the task. The Living Tradition was, in that sense, a newsletter that grew legs.
Launch in 1993 and early identity
Founded in 1993 by Pete Heywood, with Peter and Heather Heywood as its original editors, The Living Tradition set out to be a United Kingdom-wide voice for traditional music rather than a purely Scottish bulletin. That ambition shaped everything that followed: coverage ranged across English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish traditions, and beyond to international folk and roots music with a genuine connection to traditional forms. The magazine was published in A4 format, latterly as a substantial sixty-eight-page bi-monthly glossy, a physical presence that suited a readership used to buying music and print at folk clubs and festivals.
The title itself was a statement. Traditional music, the magazine argued by its existence, was not a museum exhibit but a living practice, carried by singers, instrumentalists, dancers, instrument makers, clubs, festivals and record labels, and constantly renewed by new performers. Articles on music theory and practice, and musicological and historical pieces, sat alongside contemporary news, because the tradition's past and present were understood as one continuous conversation.
Editorial content
A typical issue combined news, interviews, event listings and reviews with deeper features. Readers found reports from festivals and clubs, interviews with established and emerging artists, reviews of albums and live performances, and listings that helped them find concerts and sessions. Historical and musicological articles explored songs, tunes, instruments and regional styles, while practical pieces addressed performance and technique for musicians themselves.
That mixture distinguished The Living Tradition from both consumer music magazines and academic journals. It was scholarly enough to be respected for its historical writing, and grounded enough to be useful on a Friday night when a reader wanted to know who was playing where. Obituaries and appreciations of tradition bearers formed part of the record too, documenting lives that mainstream media rarely noticed. For a music sustained by memory and transmission, that documenting function was not a side line; it was central to the magazine's purpose.
A Scottish base with an Irish office
The magazine's geography was unusual and deliberate. Its Scottish office was in Kilmarnock, far from the London-centred music press, in a town with its own folk club history in which the Heywoods had played a part. Its Irish office in Ardara, County Donegal, recognised that Irish traditional music was not foreign coverage but part of the magazine's home territory, connected to Scotland by centuries of musical exchange across the Irish Sea.
By 2015 the editorship had passed to Fiona Heywood, with Jim Byrne editing in Donegal, after the founding editor and publisher Pete Heywood handed over. Fiona Heywood remained editor through the magazine's final years, listed alongside assistant editor Jed Mugford. That family and community continuity, from founders to a second editorial generation rooted in the same scene, gave the title a coherence that commercially driven launches rarely achieve.
The hundredth issue and FiddleOn
The Living Tradition reached its one hundredth issue in February and March 2014, a milestone few independent folk publications achieve. Longevity on that scale reflected loyal subscriptions, a defined niche and an audience that valued print as a keepsake and reference, not just as news.
In 2015, FiddleOn magazine was merged into The Living Tradition. FiddleOn had been dedicated to fiddle playing, founded by Jed Mugford and edited from Oxford for fifteen years. Mugford continued to write for The Living Tradition, and FiddleOn subscriptions were honoured by the merged title. The merger widened the magazine's instrumental coverage and brought a readership of fiddle players, from Scottish and Irish fiddlers to English and international styles, into its pages, while keeping specialist knowledge that might otherwise have been lost when a small magazine could no longer continue alone.
Voice of a community
The folk scene The Living Tradition served is a network as much as a market: folk clubs in village halls, festivals in small towns such as Girvan, sessions in pubs, dance sides, storytelling circles and a circuit of professional and semi-professional performers. Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland and the Traditional Music Forum treated the magazine as a United Kingdom-wide voice for that world, and its history was documented by those bodies as part of the story of Scottish traditional music itself.
The magazine also preserved primary material. Its archive project has presented recordings such as Nic Jones performing at Kilmarnock Folk Club in 1978, documented and indexed for listeners, an example of how a magazine rooted in club culture could act as custodian of recordings and memories that commercial archives ignore. That custodial instinct ran through its print features as well: interviews conducted at length, local scenes reported by participants, and histories written before the witnesses were gone.
Print in a digital age
Like every specialist magazine, The Living Tradition had to negotiate the move online. It maintained a website at livingtradition.co.uk with news, archive material and subscription information, while keeping print as its core product for most of its life. For its audience, print had practical virtues: it could be sold at festivals, passed around clubs, and kept on shelves alongside tune books and recordings. The bi-monthly rhythm matched the pace of a scene organised around monthly clubs and annual festivals, rather than the daily churn of popular music.
The pressures, however, were structural: rising print and postage costs, an ageing demographic in parts of the folk world, competition from free online listings and social media, and the disruption of live music during the COVID-19 pandemic years, when the clubs and festivals the magazine covered were silenced for long periods. Against that background, reaching 145 issues over twenty-nine years was itself an achievement in independent publishing.
Closure in 2022
In issue 144, covering June and July 2022, the editor announced that after issue 145 the magazine would no longer be published. The announcement closed the title in an orderly way, with notice to readers, rather than by sudden disappearance, allowing the final issues to be recognised as a farewell. Publication therefore ended in 2022, and The Living Tradition is properly described in the past tense: it was a bi-monthly magazine, published from 1993 to 2022, with the ISSN 1351-4105 recorded for its print run.
Closure left a gap. No single successor combined its United Kingdom and Ireland scope, its mix of listings, reviews, interviews and scholarship, and its base in the Scottish folk community. Online outlets, festival programmes and society newsletters each cover fragments of that territory, but the common meeting place the magazine provided, where an English morris musician, a Donegal fiddler and a Scottish ballad singer appeared in the same pages, was not replicated.
Legacy
The Living Tradition's legacy is threefold. First, it is documentary: nearly three decades of issues form an unrivalled chronicle of British and Irish traditional music between 1993 and 2022, its performers, festivals, recordings and debates. Second, it is communal: it connected a dispersed scene, making a singer in Ayrshire aware of a festival in Donegal or a fiddle style from Oxfordshire, and treating local activity as part of a shared tradition. Third, it is exemplary: it showed that a magazine founded from folk club and festival organising, without the backing of a major publisher, could become the authoritative title in its field through expertise and trust.
Researchers into folk revival culture, Scottish music and Irish traditional music in Britain will continue to cite it, and musicians who first saw their names in its listings will remember what that recognition meant. The Living Tradition set out to prove that traditional music was alive. For twenty-nine years, in Kilmarnock and Ardara and in folk clubs across these islands, it was itself part of the proof.
