That question sits at the heart of Ballad Lines — a new folk musical rooted in the migration of Scottish ballads, and framed through a contemporary queer relationship. It’s a question that grew not just from research, but from my own experience of growing up alongside a culture I loved, without seeing my full self reflected within it.
I grew up in a small fishing village on Scotland’s east coast, surrounded by folk culture without really naming it as such. Fiddle tunes, beach ceilidhs, foraging wisdom, and songs and stories passed down through family and friends were woven into everyday life. But as a young gay kid, my first real love was musical theatre. I found escape in cast recordings and in youth theatre productions that gave me space to express and play in a world where queer people often learn to contain themselves.
It took me a long time to realise that Scottish folk ballads and musical theatre are not so far apart. The ballads are dramatic, emotionally heightened, and often brutal in their honesty. They deal in love, loss, violence, inheritance, and survival. They are stories told through song — shaped and reshaped over generations to meet the needs of the people singing them.
Ballad Lines began to take shape in 2018, when those two strands of my artistic life — folk and theatre — finally met. Around that time, I was part of Bogha-Frois: Queer Voices in Folk, a project conceived by Pedro Cameron (aka Man of the Minch), which brought together LGBTQ+ musicians to tell their stories through Scottish folk music. Seeing queer people place themselves inside traditions I had loved and lived since childhood was quietly transformative. It also made something painfully clear: I had never heard queer lives centred within these songs before.
That same year, I met director Tania Azevedo, who shared my passion for new musical theatre. Together, we began to imagine what a folk musical rooted in queer experience might look like. Ballad Lines weaves together traditional ballads, contemporary original songs, and the interwoven narratives of three women linked by blood, song, and choice. Spanning continents and generations, these women are shaped by the stories they inherit — and, in turn, reshape them for those who come after.
To “queer” the folk tradition is not, for me, about rejecting what has come before. It’s about acknowledging that culture has always been shaped by those on the margins, even when their names were lost or erased. Folk traditions survive because they adapt. They change shape depending on who is holding them. As songs are passed down or carried across oceans, their lyrics, melodies, and meanings shift. It could be said that queerness operates in a similar way — fluid, ever-changing, unique to each individual, and resistant to being pinned down.
The title Ballad Lines also reflects this idea of queer inheritance. A play on bloodlines, it suggests that family isn’t only something we’re born into — it can be chosen, built, and sustained through song and story. For queer people especially, the lines of family and storytelling often run sideways rather than straight down.
Ballad Lines sits within a growing movement of queer artists reclaiming and reshaping traditional forms to tell new stories. These traditions don’t belong to a single image of nationhood or identity. They belong to anyone willing to carry them forward. When diverse voices embrace and reinvent folk traditions, those traditions become what they have always been at their best: living, breathing, and relevant — capable of holding the full complexity of our lives today.
Ballad Lines runs from 23 January – 21 March 2026 at Southwark Playhouse, 77-85 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6BD, United Kingdom.
