There’s going to be a new songbook in 2026!
There are therefore two songbooks out in 2025: a draft version of the future 2026 songbook “The Red 2025 songbook”, and a booklet of potential new songs “I Feel A Song Coming On”. There should be copies of these on your camps this year and there are digital versions of the 2025 songbooks and playlists.
We have already done extensive surveying and workshopping with hundreds of staff to get to the draft Red Songbook, and we are now asking the wider lodge (staff and interested children) to give us your thoughts, so we get a new songbook by the lodge for the lodge for the 2026 camping season. This new survey is linked here.
Read on to find out more about the process we’ve followed so far.
The 2025 Red Songbook
FSC usually creates a new songbook every 5-6 years. These add and remove songs, edit lyrics, have a new front cover, and sometimes include additional elements. The 2025 songbook does all of this, but it also makes a conscious effort to address some of the issues which have been raised since the 2017 songbook was published.
The world has moved on since 2017. Many campers have said they are uncomfortable with some of the lyrics in the songs we sing as they contain misogyny, racism, and ableism. There is also a lack of representation. People have said they feel uncomfortable camping as a result, and we are a long way behind others in the folk scene in addressing equality, diversity, and inclusion issues.
However, we also recognise that FSC’s folk legacy is extremely important and valuable. We play a unique role in preserving the oral folk song history and constantly handing it down to new children. We recognise the tension between preservation and modernisation – and that’s why we’ve undertaken widespread consultation across the lodge to produce the 2025 Red Songbook and will continue to do so through the 2025 camping season, to ensure that we produce a songbook for 2026 that is by the lodge and for the lodge.
The approach we took
In the summer of 2024, a group of staff decided to get together and make a new songbook happen. We threw invites out to the staff lodge to contribute, asking everyone on the regional Glee, Virtual Campfire, and Conscious Songbook WhatsApps – well over 300 staff.
We ended up with a group of around 50 staff on the “FSC Glee and our songs” WhatsApp group, which is where we have made all the decisions and worked asynchronously. Some staff have been constantly involved, some dipped in and out over the 6 months we wrote the songbook.
We adopted a “radically transparent” approach, making all documents available to all staff. We also took a data-led approach, undertaking a lot of analysis on the 2017 songbook, digitising all the historic songbooks from the 1968 onwards, and doing several in-person workshops as well as doing a survey (n=225) of the full staff lodge.
There is also more information on the process followed and some of the analytical output in the two documents below:
If you’re a registered member of staff, you can click here to go to the full folder which is full of spreadsheets and survey output and songbook chat and fun.
Our philosophy in making changes
FSC is a children’s educational charity. As such, one of our aims has been to create a songbook that aligns with our values, to more accurately represent us as an organisation to the children who camp with us. More on our values is available in the FSC annual report.
Here are some of the values that we have centred in this process:
- None of us has a monopoly on correct thinking, however strongly felt our views may be, nor how experienced we are
- On our camps, we teach children to live with concern and care for themselves, other people, and the environment
- Forest School Camps commits to promoting dignity and respect for all, not only to preventing discrimination within our organisation, but also to being actively inclusive
As we highlight above, we know that FSC’s place in folk history is extremely precious and that many people have strong views about making changes to the songbook. Discussions and surveys so far has shown that the majority of people broadly support the changes we propose, but we know that a significant minority oppose the idea of change, and tweaks to lyrics specifically.
We invite you to consider the following:
- FSC is not a folk music organisation but a children’s charity. Lyrics suitable for adult folk performers singing to audiences may not be the same as those we want to send 6 year olds home with
- Whilst individual lyrics and songs might not be problematic on their own, the weight of them may not accurately represent our organisation
- Everyone is welcome to continue to sing whichever lyrics or songs they most like: we are only changing the printed songbook, not mandating what people can sing
- Changes to lyrics have been deliberately minimal as possible and only done where we need to make something more inclusive. Where we have replaced verses, where possible, they’ve been either verses from previous songbooks or those widely sung in the folk canon
- Lyrics and versions of songs have regularly changed over the years in previous FSC songbooks. You can see this for yourself in our digital songbook archive here
- Everyone can get emotionally attached to specific lyrics they learned as a child. Away from any sense of making the songbook more inclusive, we had a very (very) lengthy discussion about whether it should be “She sat ‘neath the lilacs…” or “She sat under the lilacs…”, and people had strong opinions – based almost entirely on what they’d learned as children
Adding context to the book
For this songbook, we have added a lot of context because this was requested by a huge number of people. We believe this is of a high quality: we have done a lot of research, returning to primary sources, original sheet music and broadsides, consulting published papers and books, speaking to experts in the field, and using the largest archive of printed folk music in the world, housed at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. We have not used AI summaries or Wikipedia as sources!
We have also attempted to provide an approximate date of origin for all songs, as well as crediting the song’s author where possible. Dating traditional music is very difficult, and the dates listed in the Red songbook should be taken as a well-informed approximation rather than as absolute fact.
Further questions
If you’ve got any further questions, feel free to contact Emily Kerr who designed and led the process, or drop us an email on songbook@fsc.org.uk