Day 1 South Harting to Cocking, 7 miles
Listen here -> https://soundcloud.com/elizabeth-bennett-4/folk-songs-and-footpaths
‘… And they must be the footsteps of our own ancestors who made the whole landscape by hand and left their handprints on everything and trod every foot of it, and its present shapes are their footprints, those ancestors whose names were on the stones in the churchyard and many whose names weren’t. And the tales of them and of men living I would take with me and the songs in my mind as if everything I thought and felt had to be set in words and music – everything that was true in me” – From To Live Like A Man, by F C Ball (Given me to with kind permission by his relative Shirley Collins).
‘ … And that we shall go singing to the fashioning of a new world’ – The Envoi, Woodcraft Folk
The Full English The Full English was a major national digitisation and education project celebrating England’s cultural heritage through traditional folk songs, dances and customs. The project brought together the most important archival collections of folk material, held in numerous libraries and archives around the UK, and made them freely accessible through a single online digital archive. The material was drawn from Victorian and Edwardian folk collectors such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Lucy Broadwood and Cecil Sharp, and includes manuscripts of notated songs, dances, and tunes, printed broadsides, lectures, notes and correspondence. These items were conserved, digitised, and catalogued before being uploaded to a central digital archive accessible through the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website. Alongside our exisiting digitised collections, catalogues and indexes, the site now provides the largest, most comprehensive, searchable, database of English folk songs, dances, tunes, and customs in the world, with over 80,000 digitised items from 19 seminal collections. It is rich in social, family and local history and provides a snapshot of England’s cultural heritage through voices rarely published and heard before. Aims Promote the Study and Practice of the Folk Arts EFDSS’s mission statement includes “To promote, preserve and develop the folk arts”. Through providing this information in an easily accessible way, we hoped it would lead to an increase in the study and practice of the folk arts Folk is an unusual genre in that it is based in heritage. By providing access to this material, it instantly creates a wealth of material for singers, musicians, and dancers to add to their repertoires. We’ve been able to put the original MSS material online. As compared with published works which have been selected and edited, these collections are relatively unmediated. Therefore it provides an accurate look into what exactly “the folk” were doing. Access
- Provide access to materials previously difficult to access.
Digital surrogates of original manuscript material hosted on the VWML website – has a world-wide reach (where internet provision exists). Library users no longer have to travel to London to access materials, but can do so from the comfort of their own homes or singarounds, at any time of day or night. To make access even easier, we have started a programme of transcriptions of the text and music from manuscript material, which allows for full-text searching.
- Communities where this material originally came from have instant access to records of their own cultural heritage.
- Provide the information in a useful and meaningful way
From experience of how library users had wanted to access material in the past, we used this information to dictate how we catalogued and indexed the materials. E.g., performer’s names, where the information was collected; whether manuscripts contain text, music, or both; Alternate titles, etc.
- How the information is presented
Options to sort results by ref no., place, performer, collector, and relevance. Options to browse material visually by collection, or geographically through a map function. Preservation of original manuscripts If fewer people need physical access to the originals, then the strain on them is lessened. Conversely, it also means that awareness of the material is heightened and serious researches are still keen to view the original documents!
References:
Lady Maisry, Thomas Bulbeck http://www.vwml.org/record/GG/1/21/1379
Unquiet Grave, Helen Boniface http://www.vwml.org/record/GG/1/21/1390
A Farmer there lived in the North Country, Frank Hutt http://www.vwml.org/record/CC/1/339
Mother, Mother Make my Bed, Mrs Ford http://www.vwml.org/record/AGG/8/48
Barbara Ellen, Mrs Moseley http://www.vwml.org/record/CC/1/161
How Cold The Wind, George Tilson http://www.vwml.org/record/CC/1/271
Unquiet Grave, Mrs Stemp http://www.vwml.org/record/CC/1/83
The One’s That Got Away:
Thomas Bulbeck, Harting: The Highway Man Outwitted, Bushes and Briars, When First Apprenticed, The Nobleman’s Wedding, Deep in Love, Cupid the Pretty Ploughboy, Come all you Worthy People, The Golden Vanity, The Mermaid, You Seaman Bold.
Mrs Moseley, Treyford: The Drunkard’s Child, The Sailor’s Grave, The Golden Glove, Sheffield Park, Will of the Waggon Train, Now tell me Mary how it is, A Fair Maid in the Garden, The Blind Beggar’s Daughter, The Turkish Lady.
Mr Carpenter, Elsted: The Sun is Just A-Peeping Over the Hills, Master’s Health, Come All you Worthy People That Dwell Within the Land, Both Sexes Give Ear to My Fancy, The Irish Recruit, Merry Boys Merry, The Smuggler’s Boy, The Miller’s Dog.
George Tilson: Pretty Susan the Pride of Kildare, Hunt the Squirrel, On the Banks of the Sweet Dundee, General Woolf, The Bonny Bunch of Roses, The Princess Royal.
https://mainlynorfolk.info/steeleye.span/songs/thewifeofusherswell.html (The Wife of Ushers Well, sung by Gerald Moore)
https://mainlynorfolk.info/watersons/songs/thebrisklad.html (The Sheep Stealer, sung by Diane Ruinet) http://www.vwml.org/record/RoudFS/S160890
Public Archaeology 2015 