The folklorist, folk song scholar and former director of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen, Ian Russell, who has died aged 79, was the foremost authority on the local carol singing traditions in south Yorkshire and Derbyshire.

These carols never include Away in a Manger and are rarely sung in church. They generally date from a period before Victorian church reformers adopted Hymns Ancient and Modern and did away with church bands. Instead, the bands and singers took the carols into the pubs and often maintained a peripatetic tour of the local community.

When Ian started his fieldwork in 1970, he found 83 pubs to the west and north of Sheffield where the singing took place in the weeks before Christmas. He learned how the carols had been passed on orally through the generations, sometimes with the aid of family manuscripts. As an enthusiastic participant observer, he set about documenting the tradition and researching its history, and that of Derbyshire, where similar carols were sung, often in chapels.

Ian’s recordings of the carols, made in situ with a background of chinking glasses and ringing tills, were released on cassette and later CD on his own Village Carols label; a selection, English Village Carols, was published by Smithsonian Folkways in the US. In 2008, he published The Sheffield Book of Village Carols and in 2012, a Derbyshire companion volume.

In 1994, he instituted the Festival of Village Carols, held biennially in Grenoside, Sheffield, where the carols were accompanied by a full orchestra of, mainly, amateur musicians, thus reviving the church band arrangements, including the symphonies: musical interludes between verses.

Ian also discovered similar carols elsewhere, and the festival hosted carol performances from Padstow in Cornwall, Beeston in Nottinghamshire and even Glen Rock in Pennsylvania, US, where migrants from the Pennines first sang their carols in 1848.

He was born in Aberdeen, to Joan (nee Jackson) and William Russell, a hospital doctor, who became a general practitioner when the family moved to Derby. Ian’s interest in singing started as a child on car journeys with his parents, and he became a choral scholar at King’s Ely, in Cambridgeshire, where he also played guitar in a skiffle group. He then attended Nottingham high school; by his mid-teens, he was singing in Nottingham folk clubs.

At 18, he spent a year as an unqualified primary teacher in a deprived area of Nottingham, before embarking on a teacher training course at Sheffield City College of Education. On graduation, Ian first taught at Unstone junior school, Derbyshire, later becoming head of Anston Greenlands primary school, in North Anston, east of Sheffield.

The carols were just one aspect of grassroots traditional singing in south Yorkshire, and Ian had already discovered an informal network of family members and work colleagues who sang a mixture of traditional folk and music-hall style songs. As soon as he completed his teaching qualification, he enrolled at the Institute of Dialect and Folklife Studies at Leeds University, where he completed his doctorate on traditional singing in west Sheffield, in 1977.

He continued to document, research and publish on these singing traditions. Unlike many previous folksong collectors, Ian had no rigid definitions of what was worth recording. He adopted an ethnomusicological approach, valuing the social and cultural contexts of the traditional singing and the ways in which it changed and adapted over time.

In 1979 he joined the editorial board of the Folk Music Journal, published by the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), and was its editor from 1981 to 1993.

There he encouraged authors, especially those with little prior experience of academic writing. He also organised conferences on traditional song, music and fieldwork in folklore, including one to mark the centenary of the Folk-Song Society in 1998.

In 1977, his research extended to an investigation of Derbyshire’s Winster Morris Dancers. Their dances had been collected by Cecil Sharp before the first world war, but the team had lapsed in the early 1950s. Ian’s interviewing of former dancers encouraged the team to restart, with Ian providing the music on melodeon. He also recorded and researched traditional drama in Derbyshire, particularly the children’s play the Derby Tup.

In 1999, Ian was appointed the director of the Elphinstone Institute, a study centre for ethnology, folklore and ethnomusicology. Its remit included public engagement, particularly in the north of Scotland, which was ideally suited to Ian’s hands-on approach.

He initiated a range of events and research projects, including the Cullerlie traditional singing weekend, “Button Boxes and Moothies” (mout organs) events, a Polish-Scottish song group and a project on the oral and cultural traditions of Scottish Travellers. Ian’s fieldwork and research included Burns suppers, flute bands and sacred singing.

He also created the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention (NAFCo) in 2001, initially in Aberdeen, later also held in Derry, Northern Ireland, and in Newfoundland and in Cape Breton Island, Canada. As with many of Ian’s projects, NAFCo combined an academic conference alongside a full programme of concerts and learning opportunities.

He was appointed to a personal chair in 2011 and retired as emeritus professor in 2014. His research did not cease, and with his boundless enthusiasm he continued to influence, encourage and motivate researchers and musical participants. Ian was awarded the Folklore Society’s Coote Lake medal in 1987, and the EFDSS Gold Badge in 1998 and was appointed MBE in 2020.

Ian is survived by his wife, Norma (nee Carter), whom he met at college and married in 1967, along with their son, Joseph, and grandson, Tomas.

• Ian Russell, folklorist and ethnomusicologist, born 17 February 1947; died 16 May 2026