At the TSF meeting in Kings Lynn we heard about the visit of Ralph Vaughan Williams to the town in 1905. Alan Helsdon, who organised the meeting, has now released a digital book Vaughan Williams in Norfolk through Musical Traditions. This can still be downloaded from the Musical Traditions website: website.https://www.mustrad.org.uk/download/covers.htm [RS]
Carolyn Robson sent me this brief report on the ‘Full English’ educational programme that she thought you might like to hear about: ‘The Full English is possibly the most exciting and significant thing to happen to British folk music in at least a generation…It is the creation of the largest searchable digital archive of early … Read more
Gwilym Davis has sent me a note reporting that the ‘Single Gloucester’ project, which seeks to digitise and put online all the songs collected in Gloucestershire is now going fll steam after obtaining the funding that had been hoped for. Gwilym writes: Single Gloucester, a folk archive project developed by Gloucester Traditions, has been awarded … Read more
David Atkinson’s new book, The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts, has just been published by Open Book Publishers. You will find that it is available for purchase (at sensible prices) as a paperback, a hardback, as a PDF and in e-book formats. But you can also access an online edition free of charge – … Read more
We met Frieda Morrison at the TSF meeting in Edinburgh and she told us about her work as Artist in Residence at the School of Scottish Studies. Frieda has now written to tell me about one of the outcomes of her work: performances of 37 songs from the Greig-Duncan collection have been put online. You … Read more
Probably the biggest news of the year (Decade? Century?) is the launch of the Full English project. There are three main elements to the project. There is an extensive educational programme for both adults and children, of which one of the components is the series of ‘Folk Song in England’ workshops being led by Steve … Read more
We greatly enjoyed the TSF meeting hosted by ITMA in Dublin a couple of years ago and would like to congratulate them on having reached their 25th anniversary. If you have not visited their website (www.itma.ie) recently you will be delighted to discover how it has grown, with a large quantity of important recordings, videos … Read more
The greater part of Sabine Baring-Gould’s personal library was lent to the National Trust to fill the empty shelves at Killerton House, near Exeter, in the early 1970s and, after 40 years, the Trust has requested the Baring-Gould family to take the books away, so that they can create a new library, more closely linked … Read more
Steve Roud recently discovered this website, operated by the Harvard Law School Library, which has someexcellent examples of broadside ballads about crime, criminals and consequences. Goto http://broadsides.law.harvard.edu/home.php (Please be aware the site does not have a security certificate)
A group associated with the Gloucestershire folk music enthusiasts, GlosFolk have launched a new site of folksongs and related activity collected in Gloucestershire. It is at www.gloschristmas.com. This modest site is a Christmas pilot and a launch-pad for a bigger effort next year when they hope to put as many songs from Gloucestershire as possible … Read more