From the liner notes of the forthcoming record, by folklorist and musician, Таня Осінь:
The Mykolaiv region is located near the lower stream of the Southern Bug, its territories part of the Black Sea plains. It is an area with diverse demographics and a complex history.
For thousands of years, these lands had been the point of contact between various nomadic tribes and settled people. The territories weren’t densely populated until the XVIII-XIX centuries. Then an active colonisation began: Germans, Bulgarians, Jews, Moldovans, Belarusians, Russians, et cetera, settled here.
In the 1950s, people from Western Ukraine were deported to these lands. In addition, seasonal workers who came to work in agriculture for almost fifty years, also had a significant influence on the formation of Black Sea folklore. Although the ethnic composition of the modern population of the region is extremely diverse, Ukrainians make up over 80% of it. However, even among them, it is difficult to find indigenous people, which makes the study of the territory more complicated.
Late settlement and mixed ethnic composition of the settlers became one of the main reasons for the low interest of folklorists and ethnomusicologists in these areas. They directed their expeditions mostly to Polissya, Podillya, the Carpathians and some loci of Naddnipryanshchyna. The antiquity of these regions became key for the preservation of various rituals and song genres in these lands. While Slobozhanshchyna and the Pre-Steppe Zone eventually awaited their researchers, Mykolayivshchyna remained "behind the scenes" of scientific interests.
