Sandra Kerr's life in folk music began the way the best ones do: not through formal institution but through proximity to people who believed the tradition was alive and worth fighting for. As a teenager in the early 1960s, she walked into the Singers' Club in Soho Square and was captivated. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger were resident there, and they saw in her something worth investing in. In exchange for childcare, they gave her one-to-one tuition in folk song, balladry, vocal technique, and music notation — an apprenticeship model so old it predates the concept of music school. From that training came her role in MacColl's Critics Group, a select cohort of young singers whose name was meant to describe self-criticism but instead earned the group suspicion from the wider folk scene. No matter: the work was real. Kerr's most prominent contribution was The Female Frolic (1968), an album of traditional songs told from a woman's perspective — a feminist curatorial act a decade before the vocabulary for it had settled into common use. Her songwriting debut came the following year on What'll the Neighbours Say, a song that announced a voice with something to say beyond the traditional repertoire. The work that most people know her by — even if they don't know her name — came from a different angle entirely. When Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin were devising Bagpuss in the early 1970s, they turned to Kerr and her husband John Faulkner, who had already composed music for the schools television series Sam on Boffs' Island. Postgate provided song themes; Kerr and Faulkner provided lyrics, traditional tunes, and the playing — concertina, dulcimer, autoharp — filmed live. Kerr was the voice of Madeleine the Rag Doll, Faulkner the voice of Gabriel the Toad. Only 13 episodes were broadcast in 1974, but the series, voted the best-loved children's programme of all time in a 1999 poll, has never really left British cultural memory. The music is a significant part of why. After her marriage to Faulkner ended in 1975, Kerr moved into children's broadcasting — Music Box, The Song Tree, Play School — and then, in 1988, to Northumberland, where the folk scene was at a genuine moment of institutional energy. Folkworks was building infrastructure for the music: workshops, summer schools, community engagement. Kerr became a central figure in that project, and when Alistair Anderson launched the folk and traditional music degree at Newcastle University in 2001, she joined the lecturing team. Her module, Traditions of These Islands, took students back before the contemporary folk revival to the original source recordings — the singers and instrumentalists from whom the music had been collected in the first place. This was pedagogically radical in its quietness: refusing to teach the interpretation while the original remained available. Her choir work ran in parallel. She led the Caedmon community choir, founded Werca's Folk in the mid-1990s — an all-female choir singing traditional and contemporary songs reflecting women's lives — and ran folk choir workshops at the Sidmouth folk festival from 1996 to 2024, a span of 28 years. Her final solo album, Rebel With Her Chords, appeared in 2019, when she was 77. She retired from Newcastle University in 2017. She died on 29 October 2026, aged 84, of leukaemia, survived by her partner David Malone, her daughter Nancy Kerr — herself a highly accomplished folk performer — two grandsons, and a tradition she spent her life keeping honest.
