Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould was a major collector of English folk songs at the end of the nineteenth century.  Martin Graebe is the director of the Wren Trust, which preserves Baring-Gould’s papers.   Among his many achievements as a minister and an author, Baring Gould’s major accomplishment was his collection of the folk songs being sung by the people of Devon and Cornwall.  He published three books of folk songs and collaborated with Cecil Sharp on English Folk Songs for Schools in 1907. This collection of 53 songs was widely used in British schools for the next 60 years.

Martin Graebe began singing as a schoolboy and discovered folk music at his University.  He was drawn to English traditional song and started to write songs using ideas from traditional sources. The discovery of previously unknown manuscripts from Sabine Baring-Gould in 1992 led to his interest in Baring-Gould's work becoming a passion. Since then he has worked on indexing, transcribing and writing about the songs and the singers from whom they were collected.