Extract from Press Release

Hundreds of folk songs and tunes, representing a huge swathe of English traditional music heritage, are on their way back to the communities that gave birth to them.

The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has awarded a grant of £154,500 to the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) for an exciting new project entitled Take 6. The grant will enable the EFDSS to archive and conserve six unique folk song manuscripts and make them more widely accessible to the public, including some of the communities where they were first collected.
The six manuscript collections are held by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library of the EFDSS, based at Cecil Sharp House in London's Camden Town.

The award will enable the EFDSS, over the next two years, to archive and conserve over 4,400 paper items, digitise them and make them widely accessible through the web. The EFDSS will also pilot the use of the materials in London, in conjunction with a primary school in Southwark which has a history of promoting singing games – an annual festival there in the 1960s led to an album of recordings on the prestigious Topic Records label. Two of the manuscript collections will be used in primary schools and communities in two English regions where the songs were originally noted – Lancashire and Hampshire.

The Take 6 project will also produce classroom materials and exhibitions and the EFDSS will work in partnership with regional folk development agencies and volunteers to bring the songs to life for young people and hold showcase events in schools.

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