The Singer Not the Song - Launch

A display of words, spineless wonders and dialects from the singer Jennifer Reid interwoven with books from the Portico Collection. Ballads and broadsides sing out under the Portico Dome, moving between the worlds of the nineteenth-century street and the library of the elite. Jennifer’s handmade cloak, used in performance, and a copy of a vivid portrait of her by artist Ian Bruce will also be on display.

Celebrate the opening of this display with Jennifer. There may be singing . . .

Jennifer Reid Biography

Rooted in archives and oral histories, Jennifer Reid’s work braids nineteenth-century music with the present: teaching, performing, researching, sharing, advocating and supporting spaces for memory and making in the tradition. She studied at Oxford, specialising in the ballad collections of Manchester and has shaped sound for radio, stage and screen. Her research has taken her from Venice to Dhaka via New York, where she asked whether the Industrial Revolution ever really ended. She’s spoken on weaving songs in Bangladesh and Manchester, worked with scientists, poets, musicians, historians and universities and still finds time to sing stories that refuse to be forgotten.

Jennifer Reid - The Langley Linnet © Ian Bruce, 2025 www.ianbruce.net

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