Joy Bennett says she felt like she was home when she discovered folk music. “The sharing of music touches part of you maybe you didn’t know existed,” Bennett says in this week’s podcast.

Bennett is the director of Old Songs Inc., taking the helm from founder Andy Spence in 2018.  The Old Songs Festival of Traditional Music and Dance, usually held annually at the Altamont fairgrounds, was audio-only last year because of the pandemic and this year will be held as a virtual event on June 25, 26, and 27 through Zoom. The evening concerts will be simulcast on Folk Music Notebook and on the Old Songs YouTube channel. Seventy artists from around the world will perform on five stages.

One of the focuses is on The Generation Project — music passed down through families and community groups. Ustad Shafaart Khan, a classical Indian musician, for example, is a 16th-generation sitar player and the Great Gambian Griots play Mandinka kora music, passed from father to son for untold generations, making their own koras, 21-stringed harps, from calabash gourds, leather, wood, and fishing strings. “The direction is to push forward to inclusivity,” said Bennett.

She has performed for 25 years with an a cappella, all-women group called The Johnson Girls. The name comes from one of the sea chanteys they sing: “The Johnson girls is mighty fine girls, walk around, honey, walk around,” sings Bennett on the podcast in a lusty voice.

The group had to break through a glass ceiling while performing — “Those who thought a chantey singer had to be male, bearded, and with a beer gut, needed to think again,” wrote the Cornwall Guardian when The Johnson Girls performed in England, and Bennett recalls being told, “You girls sing like you have balls.”

Bennett explains that the chanteys are work songs sung by crews on 19th-Century sailing ships as they raised anchors or pumped out water; the songs coordinated their efforts and oxygenated their bodies. The chanteys were the first world music, Bennett believes, and her group has left a mark with changes they’ve made, which they hear when audiences sing with them. She says, “It is just exhilarating.”