Floyds Row’s ‘The Carlisle Sessions’: Eight Years in the Vault, Five Centuries of Song

Somewhere in the eight years between June 2018 and this August, five recordings made in a hall in Carlisle, Massachusetts sat waiting. On August 21, 2026, they finally arrive: The Carlisle Sessions, the second record from Floyds Row, released by Big Round Records — the folk and Americana imprint of PARMA Recordings — as catalogue BR9000.

The delay is the first interesting thing about this EP. The second is what is actually on it. Across just eighteen and a half minutes, Floyds Row work through a pirate ballad whose hero is a garbled memory of a real Scottish privateer, a cross-dressing war story that the Grateful Dead carried into the rock canon, two dance tunes printed in London in 1651, and a brand-new song set to words nobody can name the author of. This is not a folk record that gestures vaguely at “tradition.” It is a record with footnotes.

At a glance

• Artist: Floyds Row — a British-American folk-classical collective
• Release: The Carlisle Sessions, out August 21, 2026
• Label: Big Round Records (an imprint of PARMA Recordings), catalogue BR9000, digital
• Length: five tracks, approximately 18 minutes 29 seconds
• Recorded: June 2018 at Possum Hall, Carlisle, Massachusetts
• Personnel: Emily Noël (soprano), Asako Takeuchi (violin), George Lykogiannis (accordion), Chris Ferebee (cittern, guitar, mandolin), Andrew Arceci (viola da gamba, upright bass), George Lernis (percussion)
• Production: produced by Mac Ritchey and Floyds Row; engineered, edited and mixed by Mac Ritchey; mastered by Melanie Montgomery; cover art by Michelle O’Connell; executive producer Bob Lord
• Previous album: The Oxford Sessions (Centaur Records, 2018)

A 2018 recording arriving in 2026

The credits date the sessions precisely: June 2018, Possum Hall in Carlisle, Massachusetts, with Mac Ritchey behind the desk. That is the same year Centaur Records issued the group’s debut, The Oxford Sessions, taped at St Hilda’s College in Oxford. So these two records are near-siblings — made in the same stretch of the ensemble’s life, then separated by most of a decade before the second one surfaced.

Eight years is long enough for a band to change shape, and Floyds Row has. The roster on the group’s own site now runs to seven principal artists and more than twenty guests, drawn from early music, contemporary classical, rock and jazz. The sextet you hear on The Carlisle Sessions is a particular snapshot of a collective that has kept moving.

Chris Ferebee, who organized the original Oxford concerts, frames the project’s purpose in his note for the release: the group has always gone after “the old, forgotten, and obscure,” and wants to “re-inhabit” this material rather than preserve it under glass. That distinction matters when you look at what they picked.

Track by track: the history inside the songs

1. “George Washington’s Favorite Cotillion” (1:39)

Anonymous, arranged by George Lykogiannis, Chris Ferebee and George Lernis, and played by that trio alone — accordion, plucked strings and percussion. A cotillion was a French square-dance form that reached England around 1768 and America a few years later, arriving exactly in time to become fashionable in Washington’s adult life. Washington’s enthusiasm for the dance floor is well documented; one contemporary witness, Judge Francis T. Brooke, described him opening a ball with a minuet and then moving on to cotillions and country dances. Whether this particular tune was his favorite is a claim the title makes and history does not verify — but as an opener it does its job, kicking the record off at a dance tempo before anyone sings a word.

2. “Henry Martin” (4:42)

Anonymous, arranged by Floyds Row, and the first appearance of Emily Noël’s soprano over the full six-piece. “Henry Martin” is Child ballad 250 (Roud 104), and it is a ghost of a longer song. Behind it stands Sir Andrew Barton, Child 167, an eighty-plus-verse account of a real man: a Scottish sailor from Leith, born around 1466, who raided Portuguese shipping as a privateer and was killed in an English action in 1511. Centuries of oral transmission compressed that epic into a short, brutal ballad and — apparently through simple mishearing — turned Andrew Barton into Henry Martin. The song survived in that mangled form well into the twentieth century. It is one of the cleanest examples in the English tradition of history becoming folklore by accident.

3. “Jackaroe” (3:56)

Anonymous, arranged by Floyds Row. Despite how often it gets called one, “Jackaroe” is not a Child ballad — it is Roud 268, Laws N7, and it circulated as a British broadside in the early 1800s with American printings from around 1830. The story belongs to the “maiden warrior” tradition: a wealthy girl’s father has her lover pressed into service, so she cuts her hair, puts on men’s clothes, enlists under an assumed name, and finds him wounded. The song travels under a small army of aliases — “Jack Monroe,” “Jackie Frazier,” “Jack the Sailor” — and reached listeners who had never heard of Roud numbers through recordings by the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan. Putting it next to “Henry Martin” is a smart bit of sequencing: two songs about people going to sea under false pretenses, one tragic, one not.

4. “Maiden Lane / Kettle Drum” (4:20)

Anonymous, arranged by Floyds Row, and the one instrumental set on the record — Noël sits this one out while violin, accordion, plucked strings, gamba and percussion take it. Both tunes come from the same source: John Playford’s The English Dancing Master, first published in London in 1651. “Maiden Lane” appears there as a longways dance for three couples in G major; “Kettle Drum” as a round for four couples. Playford’s book is the foundational document of English country dance, and pairing two tunes out of a single 1651 volume gives the medley an internal logic that a random folk pairing would not have.

5. “The Song of Robin Hood & his Huntes-men” (3:52)

The only new composition here, written by Chris Ferebee for the full ensemble. Even the new song is an act of recovery: Ferebee notes that the text came from an 1865 collection of Robin Hood ballads in which the author is unknown. So the record closes with the inverse of what precedes it — old words, new music, rather than old music given a new arrangement. It is a deliberate mirror, and it is the reason the EP reads as an argument rather than a set list.

What the ensemble is actually doing

The instrumentation tells you most of it. A viola da gamba and a cittern are early-music instruments; an accordion and an upright bass are not; a soprano trained for the concert hall singing a broadside ballad is a third thing again. Floyds Row’s stated territory is the overlap between early, classical, folk, newgrass and world music, and the interest is in what happens when players from genuinely different training meet on shared repertoire rather than in any single tradition being performed correctly.

Ferebee is candid in his note that the members came from early music, contemporary classical, rock and jazz backgrounds and found common ground in the old ballads and tunes — and that the record was made, above the friction of style, with a commitment to the music and to each other. For a five-track EP that sat unreleased for eight years, that is a fairly load-bearing statement.

Where to hear Floyds Row live

The ensemble has dates on the books either side of the release. Singapore comes first, in October 2026. A US tour follows in March 2027:

• March 6, 2027 — ASU Kerr, Scottsdale, Arizona
• March 10, 2027 — Winchendon Music Festival, Winchendon, Massachusetts
• March 12, 2027 — Cultural Center of Cape Cod, South Yarmouth, Massachusetts
• March 13, 2027 — Harmony on the Green Coffeehouse Concerts, Lexington, Massachusetts

Floyds Row has previously played the American Folk Art Museum, Berklee College of Music, Club Passim, King’s Chapel, Rockwood Music Hall, the Museum of Arts & Design, the Gaithersburg Arts Barn and the Winchendon Music Festival, among other venues in the UK and US.

Frequently asked questions

When is The Carlisle Sessions released?

The Carlisle Sessions is released on August 21, 2026 by Big Round Records, an imprint of PARMA Recordings, under catalogue number BR9000. It is issued as a digital release.

Who is Floyds Row?

Floyds Row is a British-American folk-classical collective that grew out of a series of concerts at the University of Oxford, organized by Chris Ferebee with Alistair Anderson, Andrew Arceci and guest musicians. On The Carlisle Sessions the group is Emily Noël (soprano), Asako Takeuchi (violin), George Lykogiannis (accordion), Chris Ferebee (cittern, guitar and mandolin), Andrew Arceci (viola da gamba and upright bass) and George Lernis (percussion).

How many tracks are on The Carlisle Sessions?

Five. The EP runs about 18 and a half minutes: “George Washington’s Favorite Cotillion” (1:39), “Henry Martin” (4:42), “Jackaroe” (3:56), “Maiden Lane / Kettle Drum” (4:20) and “The Song of Robin Hood & his Huntes-men” (3:52).

Where and when was The Carlisle Sessions recorded?

It was recorded in June 2018 at Possum Hall in Carlisle, Massachusetts — eight years before its 2026 release. Mac Ritchey engineered, edited and mixed the sessions and co-produced with the ensemble; Melanie Montgomery mastered the record.

What was Floyds Row’s first album?

The Oxford Sessions, released on Centaur Records in 2018 and recorded at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. The Carlisle Sessions is the follow-up, and was taped the same year as that debut appeared.

Are the songs on The Carlisle Sessions traditional?

Four of the five are traditional and anonymous, arranged by the ensemble: “Henry Martin” is Child ballad 250, “Jackaroe” is Roud 268 (Laws N7), and “Maiden Lane” and “Kettle Drum” both come from John Playford’s The English Dancing Master of 1651. The closing track is newly composed by Chris Ferebee, set to an anonymous text he drew from an 1865 collection of Robin Hood ballads.

Where can I see Floyds Row live?

The ensemble has announced dates in Singapore in October 2026 and a US tour in March 2027 that includes ASU Kerr in Scottsdale, Arizona (March 6), the Winchendon Music Festival in Winchendon, Massachusetts (March 10), the Cultural Center of Cape Cod in South Yarmouth, Massachusetts (March 12) and Harmony on the Green Coffeehouse Concerts in Lexington, Massachusetts (March 13).

The Carlisle Sessions by Floyds Row is released August 21, 2026 on Big Round Records (BR9000). More at floydsrow.com and bigroundrecords.com.