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Contents
What's new
Site map
My folk club etc pages
This is a guide to Internet resources relating to English folk music. A fuller statement of the aims and scope of these pages is on another page. Comments and suggestions - especially about useful resources I have overlooked - to me Martin Nail), please.
A good starting point, with many links to English as well as world music, is Folk Roots magazine's site. Two UK-based magazine-like sites with their own content plus links to many other sites are Folk and Roots, and Folking.com. A comparable site based in Germany is FolkWorld. FolkWorld's Folk & roots online guide is a listing of of Internet folk music resources.
A new resource is Folkipedia, "a user contributable collection of web pages on all and every topic to do with folk". The project is new and there is not a lot of content at present but it is growing.
The BBC Radio 2 Folk and Acoustic site contains information about the folk scene in the UK: news, reviews, tours, artists, folk clubs, etc, and of course a site for the Mike Harding Show.
There are a number of discussion fora which cover the English folk scene, including the fRoots Forum and The Mudcat Café (which though American has many English contributors and has many threads of purely English interest such as discussion about English licensing laws). The main Internet newsgroup is uk.music.folk, though some discussion which used to take place here has now migrated to the forums just described; as with other Usenet newsgroups, there is an archive of the group in Google Groups. There is a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for the group.
I have a listing of Music subject search tools: a guide to link lists, search engines, and subject gateways, concentrating on those covering folk music and ethnomusicology. You can also of course use general search engines like Google, but for general queries they are likely to overload you with results of little relevance. They can however be useful for some sorts of specific queries, such as bands with distinctive names.
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There are interesting discussions on the tradition, and the meaningfulness of terms such as 'folk' and 'traditional' on the Musical Traditions magazine Enthusiasms and Letters pages. Bill Markwick's somewhat idiosyncratic The Folk File: a folkie's dictionary describes itself as 'A collection of terms related to folk music, plus some mini-biographies, musicology terms, trivia, and miscellaneous facts and figures'.
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The main national organisations with websites are:
My Folk and traditional music in specific areas of England page on this site lists folk song clubs and other local organisations with Web pages. Martin Kiff's Webfeet pages contain lists of English Ceilidh and English Folk Dance series and dance clubs.
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The major specialist collection of printed material and sound recordings is the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The Library now has an Online Catalogue, currently containing records for the Leslie Shepard Collection. Following this pilot, it will convert and upload existing electronic data, as well as converting its card catalogues and adding new acquisitions directly onto the system. The VWML Online site contains a number of indexes etc which are described in the Discographies, bibliographies and indexes and Song, tune and dance collections sections below.
The national collection of sound recordings of folk and traditional musics is the World and Traditional Music collection of the British Library Sound Archive. Items in it are listed in the British Library Sound Archive Catalogue, available online. The Archive's Traditional Music in England Project digitised, catalogued and has made available a number of important collections of English songs and music from the second half of the twentieth century.
The major collections of material from the former library of the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition are now incorporated in the University Library of the University of Sheffield.
Many other libraries in England such as the Bodleian Library have substantial printed and manuscript collections of English folk music material. Cecilia is an on-line guide to music collections in archives, libraries and museums in the UK and Ireland.
The most comprehensive collection of folk and traditional musical instruments is in the Horniman Museum in London. Other museums in the UK with musical instrument collections are listed in the CIMCIM International Directory of Musical Instrument Collections: UK.
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Folk music - and folklore generally - barely exists as a academic study in England. We have no organisation equivalent to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in the USA, or even the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Perhaps the major university department in this field in England is the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition at the University of Sheffield. The University of Newcastle upon Tyne now offers an undergraduate degree course in Folk and Traditional Music. The Open University's Musics and Cultures Research Group is no more, but its web page has details of past activities.
The Traditional Song Forum is an association of people interested in research, collection and performance of traditional song, principally of the British Isles. There is an associated Yahoo! discussion list called Tradsong. The Doc Rowe Archive and Collection is a major contemporary collection of material relating to traditional seasonal customs.
Collections of recordings made in England now in the British Library Sound Archive are listed in a Guide to European ethnographic sound recordings collections in PDF format (77.46 KB).
The EFDSS Take Six website contains a searchable database of the archives of seven of the UK's most prominent folksong collectors (Sabine Baring-Gould, Janet Blunt, George Butterworth, Frances Collinson, George Gardiner, Anne G Gilchrist and the Hammond Brothers). A catalogue of the archives can be browsed and searched and over twenty-two thousand digitised images can be viewed.
Other sites relating to collectors from previous generations include the catalogue of the James Madison Carpenter Collection, (a major collection of traditional song and drama, from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the USA) now online. Martin Graebe's Songs of the West site "describes the life and work of Sabine Baring-Gould and the collection of songs that he made at the end of the nineteenth century".
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Jacey Bedford maintains a list Folk magazines in the UK and the South Riding Folk Arts Network site has a list of Internet Resources: Directories and Magazines.
Folk Roots has a list of Radio & TV stations and programmes, both broadcast and Internet-based. Some Internet radio stations which feature English music (as part of wider programming) are The Music Well (formerly RadioBritfolk), FolkCast, and Fred McCormick's Worlds of Trad.
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Rod Stradling is compiling a Discography of Recorded Traditional Music on the Musical Traditions site. This site also contains The Complete Topic Records Discography by Mike Brocken, Alistair Banfield & Rod Stradling. David Atkinson's English Folk Song: an introductory bibliography: Discography (PDF file) is part of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library series of study guides. Jane Keefer's Folk Music: an Index to Recorded Resources contains over 63,580 songs and tunes from about 4,400 recordings (November 2008). Coverage is largely American, but British and Irish records are included; it is indexed by title and performer. Selected English Folk Singers contains discographies (including track listings) for about twenty English revival performers. Many of the artists' pages mentioned below contain individual discographies.
An important resource - though not of course limited to folk music - is the British Library Sound Archive Catalogue.
The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library has started publishing its series of study guides on the EFDSS website. Those available so far are:
The South Riding Folk Arts Network site has a list of Song collections: online books and Song collections: websites. It also has an extensive bibliography of Folk song studies, in five sections: online books and journals, journal articles, websites, Indexes, bibliographies and finding aids, and related material.
Although their focus is on American and Scottish folk music, the listings at Folk Ballad Bibliography contain much material of interest.
VWML Online contains a number of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library's indexes to manuscript collections (Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Maud Karpeles, Lucy Broadwood, the Hammond bothers, Francis Collinson, George Gardiner, and Percy Grainger). Also on this site is the Roud Folk Song Index, which is Steve Roud's indispensable database of 143,000 references to songs that have been collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world.
Two useful indexes to printed collections of English, American and Celtic tunes are James Stewart's TuneIndex (55,000 entries), and Andrew Kuntz's The Fiddler's Companion (over 30,000 entries as at November 2000, including some actual tunes in abc notation), both on the Ceolas Celtic music site. The TuneIndex Introduction has a good discussion of tune types. The Village Music Project has a list of manuscript collections and publications of English country dance tunes.
Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle of California State University, Fresno have compiled The Traditional Ballad Index: An Annotated Bibliography of the Folk Songs of the English-Speaking World. Bruce Olson's Roots of Folk: Old English, Scots, and Irish Songs and Tunes has links to collections of tunes and of texts of broadside ballads. Cathy Lynn Preston has a "Working" KWIC Concordance to Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898)
The Plymouth Library Service's Plymouth Song Index is an "index of over 60,000 song titles in nearly 2,000 songbooks": it is not restricted to folksong, but includes many folksong collections (the Library houses a Baring-Gould collection).
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There are a number of online songbooks, tunebooks and dance collections, few restricted to English music. Most have been compiled as practical tools and often give little indication of the provenance of their contents.
Over 20,000 archival recordings of English traditional songs and music are available online on the Traditional music in England page on the British Library website. Collections include those made by Bob and Jacqueline Patten Collection, Desmond and Shelagh Herring, John Howson, Keith Summers, Nick and Mally Dow, Reg Hall, Roy Palmer, Steve Gardham and Terry Yarnell. They can be browsed by map, county, performer, recordist, Sound Archive collection, or title.
The biggest online collection of Anglo-American folk song is the Digital Tradition database; the latest (Spring 2002) version contains 8981 texts, some with music: there are fewer distinct songs as some variants have separate entries (eg there are five versions of Barbara Allen). Entries vary in accuracy and extent of specified provenance. It can be searched online, or downloaded for use offline. Searching is possible using words from titles or texts, assigned keywords, and various other ways including Child and Laws numbers. The Digital Tradition also has an active online forum which is a useful place to post requests for words of songs. Previous discussions in the Forum archive are searchable, and the user can find some texts of songs not in the main database in this way (the default is to search both the database and the forum).
A much smaller (about 1000 songs) but better documented collection is at Folkinfo; this too has an accompanying discussion forum.
The EFDSS Take Six website contains a searchable database of the archives of several folksong collectors (Sabine Baring-Gould, Janet Blunt, George Butterworth, Frances Collinson, George Gardiner, Anne G Gilchrist and the Hammond Brothers). Digitised copies of the collectors' field notebooks and fair copies can be viewed.
Another American resource is Lesley Nelson-Burns's Folk Music of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and America which contains texts and tunes (in midi format) including Child ballads. Richard Kopp has a similar site which includes Songs of England.
The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads site contains indexes to, and facsimiles of, over 30,000 broadside ballads. The English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California at Santa Barbara contains detailed cataloguing, images, transcriptions, and in some cases recordings, of English black-letter broadside ballads of the 17th century. The site currently contains the Pepys Collection from Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the team are working on the Roxburghe Ballads from the British Library.
For those who cannot find the words they want in any of the above, there is a large number of more general sites on the web containing words of songs: a good list of these is on Yahoo! at: Entertainment/Music/Lyrics/. Otherwise, using a general search engine -- such as Goggle -- may come up with the answer, especially if there are unusual words in the text.
Many tune collections use Chris Walshaw's abc musical notation language, described on the abc music notation site. the site contains a list of abc collections and an abc tune search which covers around 275,000 tunes in 120,000 files from British, Irish, American and European collections. Another index to abc collections (and some in other formats) is JC's ABC tune finder. Folk Tune Finder is a search engine for traditional tunes which indexes many ABC collections on the Internet.
Richard Robinson collection has a list of links to a number of other tune collections. The Round English Country Dance Club have a Folk Music Index which is an index to dance tunes on the Web in various formats. Though neither is restricted to English tunes, the best sources of English dance tunes are Richard Robinson's Tunebook (in abc format) and Eric Foxley's Music Database (Nottingham ASCII format). Steve Allen has an ABC library of morris tunes.
The Village Music Project aims to locate original manuscript material and recordings of traditional social dance music of England and make them available for research and performance. There is an associated Yahoo! discussion list called tradtunes.
A small number of callers have started to put collections of dances up on the Web, but there is nothing very comprehensive. Martin Kiff has a list of these on his English Folk dance index page.
Robert M. Keller's The Dancing Master, 1651-1728: An Illustrated Compendium contains a database of all the dances from all the editions of John Playford's Dancing Master.
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There are quite a few websites and newsgroups devoted to specific musical instruments. Obviously, most instruments are used to play many different types of music, so it is easier to find folk-related resources for those (such as free-reeds, dulcimers and bagpipes) which are primarily folk instruments. The Roots.net collection of instrument links has disappeared again.
Although not exclusively English in scope, the following resources certainly include English folk music and contain links to further resources. Although there are dozens of fiddle and guitar sites, I have only found a couple which are particularly relevant to players of English music. Further recommendations welcome. There are various instrument makers listed on my folk music businesses page.
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Starting points for some specific types of English folk music are as follows; each of these sites contains links to further resources.
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A new listing site for folk events in Britain is Simply What's On.
For comprehensive information on dance events see Martin Kiff's excellent Webfeet pages.
There is no central source of information about folk song events in England. My Folk and traditional music in specific areas of England page includes links to Web resources for folk song and music events and/or venues in England including both regional/county/local listings and individual folk clubs. Forthcoming artists' tours can also be found on many of the artists' pages mentioned below.
A new lsting of sessions in Britain is UKSessions which has a useful facility to search for sessions within a chosen distance of any postcode. There is a list of sessions in England and further afield on the Musical Traditions site, and a Sessions index for the UK and Ireland on the Living Tradition site.
The Folk Roots list of folk festivals includes folk festivals in England.
Many of the pages for Specific genres (above) have lists of relevant events.
The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library has organised series of lectures in the past but none are currently being advertised.
There doesn't seem to be a list of these on the Web. The Morris Ring list of Traditional Morris Events is mainly revival morris. Some traditional customs such as Bampton Traditional Morris Men and Abingdon Traditional Morris Dancers, and revived customs such as Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green and Whittlesea Straw Bear have their own Websites.
Forthcoming performances of folk plays are listed in Forthcoming Folk Play Performances.
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A specifically English site is Rufus Sargent's Selected English Folk Singers which contains information and discographies for a number of revival performers. Local printed and online folk magazines often contain information about local performers. I list these in the Regional/county/local event listings or Other resources headings for each region on my Folk and traditional music in the specific areas of England page
An increasing number of English folk music performers have Web pages, created by themselves, their agents and record companies, or by fans. I have page listing English folk music performers with Websites. Otherwise, one the best listings is the Folk Music Home Page: although American it covers British artists as well. There is a listing of Lists of Artist Home Pages in Doug Henkle's FolkLib Index.
I have put together a short list of English solo singers and instrumentalists with Websites.
I have put together a short list of English bands and groups with Websites. English ceilidh bands and English folk dance bands are listed in Martin Kiff's Webfeet pages. West gallery quires are listed on the West Gallery Music Association site.
John Maher's Mainly Morris Dancing page has a list of morris sides in England with web pages, together with many other morris links.
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My Folk music businesses page has listings of websites for:
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Another page of this site lists Web resources for Folk and traditional music in specific areas of England. To go straight to regional listings use the following links:
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Page created by Martin Nail. Copyright © 2011 Martin Nail. Last revised 10th February 2011
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