David Francis

David Francis has been involved in folk music in Scotland for around 40 years as a folk club organiser, musician, researcher and administrator, and is also involved in other aspects of the folk arts such as dance and storytelling.

As a musician, David is known for his guitar and song writing work with his wife, Mairi Campbell in their duo, The Cast, with which he recorded and toured in the 90s and 00s. The duo was nudged into the spotlight and temporary solvency when their version of Robert Burns’s original setting of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was picked up for the film of the hit TV show, Sex and the City.

Writing includes the promenade play, Poundland and with Mairi Campbell two song and storytelling shows, The Red Earth and Revival! He has also been librettist on three musical theatre shows for Youth Music Theatre UK. He is currently working on his first novel.

As a researcher he has produced two major reports on traditional music in Scotland, one for the Scottish Arts Council in 1999, and one for the Ministerial Working Group on Traditional Arts, which he chaired, for the Scottish Government in 2010.

Now retired, from 2009 to 2025 he was Director of the Traditional Music Forum, Scotland’s network of traditional music organisations, which he helped to found in 2004. In 2015 the Forum became part of TRACS, Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland, of which he was also Director. He is was a past Chair of the European Folk Network, and serves on several boards including the Music Education Partnership Group and Concerto Caledonia, and on the Council of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics.