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 a Heritage Lottery Grant of £27,000 to publish the county’s songs and tunes on-line.
The Gloucestershire Traditions team have a plan to publish all of the known songs and tunes from the county on an easily accessible web-site. To this end, the team has been collaborating with Gloucestershire Archives, Gloucestershire Music Makers and the English Folk Dance and Song Society, as well as collectors and source singers.
The project is ambitious and is the first of its kind anywhere in England. It will transcribe each song into easy to download formats, like song sheets, with mp3 or MIDI files. This will enable anyone to pick up a song from their own location or family and sing it straight away.
The first year of the project will be spent building the website and populating it with the songs, whilst in the second year, an education and awareness campaign will be launched to reach out to choirs, schools, the folk music community and researchers world-wide.
We have taken care to ali our efforts with the EFDSS “Full English” project and we will be sharing information.
On Friday, 22nd August, the project was officially launched in Gloucester, in the presence of the Mayor of Gloucester, the Chairman of the County Council plus representatives from the folk community, collectors, educationalists, source singers, families of source singers and supporters. Musical entertainment was provided by Shepherd’s Crook Folk Choir, Steve Rowley and Ken Langsbury.
Progress on the project can be found on the website http://gloucestershiretraditions.co.uk/.