from Malcolm Taylor
Clearly, I jumped the gun when I started this thread - but here, now, are the full details of what will undoubtedly be the most important event in English traditional song in this decade. Three cheers for Malcolm and the VWML Library staff.


Press Release
from the
English Folk Dance and Song Society
Cecil Sharp House,
2 Regent's Park Road,
Camden Town,
London NW1 7AY
Take 6 Archives Website Goes Live!
ENGLAND'S HERITAGE OF FOLK SONGS 'GIVEN BACK' TO THE NATION


From a small room in London's Camden Town, a treasury of England's folk songs is made available online.

In 2007 the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded £154,000 to the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) for its "Take 6 Project." The aims of the project were to:

• Catalogue, conserve and digitise six of its major manuscript collections of England's folk songs – those collected by Janet Blunt, George Butterworth, Francis Collinson, George Gardiner, Anne Geddes Gilchrist, and the Hammond Brothers

• Make the collections freely accessible to all through a dedicated website

• Give the songs back to the areas where they were first collected in the early twentieth century through projects with primary sc hools in Lancashire, Hampshire and London

• Develop an interactive website designed especially for children to explore and learn folk-songs from the EFDSS archives, with additional tips and classroom materials
and for teachers (to be launched Thursday 2 July 2009)

• Raise community awareness of Take 6 and the songs and music collected in Lancashire and Hampshire through leaflets, displays and events


The EFDSS is delighted to announce that 9th June 2009 sees the launch of a dedicated website for these six manuscript collections – a first in the field of folklore in the UK. Access to 22,000 images of the actual documents, notebooks and letters of six major fieldwork ers at the tips of your fingers, fully indexed and searchable.

'What inspired George Butterworth's masterpiece, The Banks of Green Willow?'
What did William 'Binx' Walton tell the Lady of the Manor about Morris Dancing and Christmas Carols in Oxfordshire?
What do Andover, Portsmouth and Preston Candover in Hampshire all have in common?
Go to:
http://library.efdss.org/archives

For further information please contact Jon Garlick at EFDSS Marketing Department on 020 7485 2206 ext. 22 or
marketing@efdss.org

NOTES TO EDITORS:
For nearly a century the English Folk Dance and Song Society have been
preserving and disseminating our folk heritage. The Society aims to promote the best
of folk arts through a range of mediums including dance, music, song, film,
exhibitions, publications and our library collections; engage new generations with the
folk arts through workshops, classes and study, and to ensure that the folk arts are a
fundamental part of the cultural life of the UK. The EFDSS is a charity registered in
England and Wales, No. 305999

The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library is the internationally renowned multi-
media library and archive of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS).
Recognised as England's national repository for folk arts materials, it has evolved
into an outstanding multi-media collection since its inception with the opening of Cecil
Sharp House in 1930.

HLF
The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) was set up by Parliament in 1994 to give
grants to a wide range of projects involving the local, regional and national heritage
of the United Kingdom. The fund distributes a share of the money raised by the
National Lottery for Good Causes. HLF is administered by the Trustees of the
National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) which allocates around £10 million per
annum to our national heritage, acting as a fund of 'last resort'.
http://www.hlf.org.uk/English

Janet Heatley Blunt (1859-1950)
Born in India to a military family but settling at
Halle Place, West Adderbury, Oxfordshire after the death of her mother, Janet initially
became interested in folk song because they were like the songs her father had
known as a boy in Hampshire. She was further inspired by the work of Cecil Sharp
and other collectors associated with the Folk-Song Society and English Folk Dance
Society. Concerned that the old songs were dying out, she spent many hours with
local singers, writing down the words and music she found, sometimes inviting
singers into her home so she could use the piano to help her notate the tunes
accurately. One of her most important informants was a stonemason, shopkeeper
and pub landlord, William 'Binx' Walton, who gave her both songs and also the
dancing traditions of Adderbury Morris, of which he was the leader. These are
significant in that the dances incorporated songs. She also had a keen interest in
Basque music and dance. She noted down around 125 songs from forty-six singers,
mainly from or around Adderbury, while friends and fellow collectors sent her an
additional 80.

Francis James Montgomery Collinson (1898-1984)
Born in Edinburgh to a musical
family, after demobilization in 1919 he matriculated in music studies at the University
of Edinburgh and gained a MusBac in 1923. He sought his fortune in the sphere of
musical entertainment in London, where he met with some success and conducted
for both Cole Porter and Richard Tauber. In 1941 Collinson took charge of the BBC's
Country Magazine programmes. These programmes, many of them outside
broadcasts, involved Collinson in the study, collection, and arrangement of folk-
songs throughout Britain, Bob and James Copper from Sussex and Harry Cox from
Norfolk being three of his 'finds'. He not only published these arrangements in a
series with Francis Dillon from 1946 onwards but also issued three unique 78 r.p.m.
recordings of folk songs in the Gramophone Company's Plum Label series. His
manuscripts of music collected from English sources, principally in the southern
counties, reside with VWML. They comprise six volumes of mainly handwritten notes,
musical notation and letters, containing over 500 items.

George Barnet Gardiner (1852/3-1910)
Born in Kincardine-on-Forth, Perthshire,
Gardiner learned of the burgeoning interest in folk song in England in the early years
of the twentieth century and immediately joined the Folk-Song Society. Lucy
Broadwood, then secretary of the Folk-Song Society, suggested to Gardiner that he
concentrate his collecting on the county of Hampshire, which was largely unexplored
and where composer Balfour Gardiner (no relation) lived and would assist with the
noting of tunes. After an initial burst of activity there in 1905, Gardiner returned with
two other collaborators, Charles Gamblin and C.F. Guyer, to work in a more
concentrated manner. Of approximately 1100 songs noted up to December 1907,
Gardiner copied out only 800, but another 600 or so songs remained in his
notebooks, which he either felt were not good enough to copy or he simply didn't
have the time or energy to work on them. Gardiner seems to have ceased his
collecting activity in 1909 when the Folk-Song Society's Journal (no. 13) was devoted
to his work. That year also saw the publication of a third volume of Folk-Songs of
England, under the general editorship of Cecil Sharp, sixteen of Gardiner's collected
songs being included as arranged for piano by Gustav Holst. But it was not until the
work of James Reeves and Frank Purslow that his immensely important collection
was fully re-appraised and its true worth realised and placed in context with his
contemporaries.

Henry Edward Denison Hammond (1866-1910)
Born at Priston, Somerset, his
brother Robert Francis Frederick two years later, Henry met George Gardiner whilst
on the staff of the Edinburgh Academy. Henry was appointed Director-General of
Education in Rhodesia in 1899 until his health failed and he returned home after only
a year. He then teamed up with George Gardiner for his first foray into folk song
collecting in 1904 (Henry noting the tunes) and continued in a more serious manner
with brother Robert (who noted the texts) the following year in Minehead, Somerset,
where they were 'trying to collect some of the gleanings of Mr. Sharp's harvest'.
Correspondence with Lucy Broadwood in June 1905 resulted in the brothers turning
their attention to Dorset where, in August, September and October, they noted 193
songs. From then until the end of 1907 they worked tirelessly, meeting a number of
singers with impressive repertoires, including Mrs. Russell at Upwey in 1907, who
finally gave them a hundred songs. Over 900 songs were noted in total from 193
singers in six counties, the vast majority from Dorset.

Anne Geddes Gilchrist (1863-1954)
Anne Gilchrist was born in Manchester to
Scottish parents and dedicated much of her life to collecting and studying folk music
in England, specializing in songs and tunes from her home county of Lancashire.
Known among folklorists of her time for her supporting role in England's Folk Song
Society, she was one of several independent-minded women active in folk music's
so-called First Revival between 1880 and 1914. Exposed to folk songs through her
parents' singing, Gilchrist was also fond of church hymns and the singing games she
learned as a child at her grandfather's house in Cheshire during Christmas visits.
Though as an adult she had 'put away childish things', her chance attendance at a
public lecture by an English folk song collector later re-awakened her childhood
memories and Gilchrist began actively studying and collecting folk songs. Between
1898 and 1909, she used contacts from her daily life to locate likely singers and
musicians, documenting singing games such as 'In and Out the Windows' and 'Sally
Waters' that she found at an orphanage in Southport where she and her sisters did
volunteer work, gathering songs like 'Barbara Allen' and 'Green Gravel' in Sussex
during visits to her brother who was a minister there, and persuading her aunts and
uncles to sing songs like 'The Barring of the Door' and 'Cuddy Alone' for her. As a
collector, Gilchrist amassed a considerable number of broadsides, Child ballads,
carols, street cries, nursery songs, hymns, and dance tunes, among other types of
folk music. She was especially proud of the shanties and sea songs she collected
from an old sailor in Southport (the first published in the Folk Song Society's journal)
and the seasonal Lancashire rush-cart and pace-egging songs. Though not as large
as other collections from the period, Gilchrist's work gained her the respect of her
fellow folk music collectors.

George Sainton Kaye Butterworth (1885–1916)
One of England's most distinctive
composers, Butterworth was born in London, the only child of Sir Alexander Kaye
Butterworth (1854–1946), a solicitor and later general manager of the North Eastern
Railway Company, and his wife, Julia Marguerite (1849–1911), a professional
soprano before her marriage. He first attended school in Yorkshire before entering
Eton College as a King's scholar in 1899. Following a brief teaching post at Radley
College he returned to London and from October 1910 to November 1911 he was
enrolled at the Royal College of Music, where he studied organ and piano, as well as
theory and composition. His involvement with English folk music and dance now
began, and his intimate friendship and collaboration with a leading figure of this
movement, Ralph Vaughan Williams, which had begun in his Oxford days, was
central to this. He became a collector, noting down more than 450 items, including
songs, dance tunes, and dances. In 1906 he joined the Folk-Song Society, and he
was a prominent figure in the English Folk Dance Society, of which he was one of the
founders in 1911, as well as a member of its dance demonstration team. He collected
and arranged an album of Sussex folk songs and, in collaboration with Cecil Sharp,
published several books of country and morris dances. Butterworth enlisted on the
outbreak of war in August 1914 and was commissioned in the 13th Durham light
infantry. He was three times recommended for, and was twice awarded, the Military
Cross. The second decoration honoured conduct on the morning of his death, 5
August 1916, when he was killed by a bullet through the head at Pozières during the
first battle of the Somme. He was buried at the front line.