Sources for Traditional Music and Lyrics for the British Isles

Stolen from Martin Nail most useful website - Thanks Martin! English folk and traditional music on the Internet

Songs, tunes and dances

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.

Songs
The biggest online collection of Anglo-American folk song is the Digital Tradition database; the latest (Fall 1999) version contains 8024 entries, some with music There are fewer distinct songs as some variants have separate entries (eg there are five versions of Barbara Allen). It can be searched online, or downloaded for use offline in DOS interface, which as an infrequent user I find unintuitive to use. Jim Lawton has written a Windows 95/NT interface which is a easier to use (though without all the functionality of the DOS interface); this can be downloaded from his DonkeyWork site. In both cases, searching is possible on both words from the texts and on assigned keywords (which are available as a browsable list).
Another American resource is Lesley Nelson'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.

Tunes
Many tune collections use Chris Walshaw's abc musical notation language, described in The abc home page. This page contains a list of tune collections which use the format and the web-wide abc index which includes "19978 titles for 18282" from about 220 collections (as of April 2002). Another index to abc collections (and some in other formats) is JC's ABC tune finder.
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 Nottingham Folk Music Database (Nottingham ASCII format). Steve Allen has an ABC library of morris tunes.

Dances
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.

A Traditional Music Library: - A large archive of traditional, folk, and roots music with sheet music and midis. Includes Bluegrass, Old-time, Irish, Scottish, Country dance, Session tunes etc.

Y diweddaraf • Last updated 9.2.2006
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