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Folk and traditional music
Musical
Traditions
An essential read for anyone with a serious interest in
traditions of music-making from Britain and around the world.
In-depth reviews and articles, many with audio clips.
English folk
and traditional music on the Internet
"a guide to the most useful Internet resources... for those interested
in English folk and traditional music", maintained by my fellow
librarian Martin Nail.
English Folk Dance
& Song Society
The EFDSS is worth supporting if only for the sake of the unique
(overused word, but I do mean unique) Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.
Join now!
The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library
Website for the library of the EFDSS. The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library’s online catalogues provide access to thousands of digitised resources - original manuscripts from collectors such as Sharp, Vaughan Williams, Butterworth and Baring-Gould, as well as field recordings.
Songs
The Bodleian Library's Broadside Ballad collection contains images of
hundreds of original ballad sheets held in the library. The texts are
not digitised, and some of the words can be rather difficult to make out
- but only because the 17th / 18th / 19th century original is not always
in mint condition!
Includes versions of several songs recorded or performed by Magpie Lane
- including Stuff Your Guts, Oxford City,
and Woodstock Town.
A similar site based on Scottish collections is the
National Library of Scotland's Word on the Street site. This also includes text transcriptions of the songs and ballads -
although beware, not all of these transcriptions is 100% accurate.
Another useful site for sheet music (including
plenty of songs which entered the tradition) is the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music
Collection - check out the original version of The Swiss Boy and be
thankful we know it today as a dance tune, not a song!
Copper Family fan? Then visit www.thecopperfamily.com for news, and to purchase their books and recordings; and Gary Gillard's Copper Family archive, which gives the words to all the songs in their songbook.
Instrumental Music
Want to learn some more English tunes, or find
something out about the musicians who played them in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries? You need Johnny Adams's Village Music Project,
which has a growing number of tune collections available in abc format.
And then, of course, you need to visit Chris
Walshaw's abc
homepage to find out everything about this incredibly handy music
notation system - and to download one of several shareware readers
available.
West Gallery and Shape Note
music
West Gallery Music is the music sung
and played in English country churches and chapels in the 1700s and
early 1800s. Over the last thirty years a great deal of research has
been carried out into the people (mainly ordinary working men and women)
who composed and performed West Gallery music; and there are now
enthusiastic groups all over the country who get together to perform
this stirring, vigorous music. To learn more, visit West Gallery Music Association.
For more on the closely related American Shape
Note / Sacred Harp singing traditions see www.fasola.org
Concertinas
Concertina anorak? Have a look at
The Concertina Library
a digital online reference library for
all concertinas, with contributions from many expert authors:
instruction books, sheet music, history documents, patents, technical
papers, and new research articles by leading scholars, plus links to
other concertina websites.
- excellent new site at www.concertina.com
Concertina.net
Chris Timson's Concertina FAQ
And you might want to check out the recordings on my Squeezed Out blog.
For repairs and maintenance on my instruments I
always go to Steve Dickinson at C. Wheatstone & Co.