Musical Traditions
An essential read for anyone with a serious interest in traditions of music-making from Britain and around the world. In-depth reviews and articles - many with Real Audio clips - and a selection of good links too.

English folk and traditional music on the Internet
"a guide to the most useful Internet resources... for those interested in English folk and traditional music", maintained by my fellow librarian Martin Nail.

English Folk Dance & Song Society
Having for a long time been the organisation we all love to hate, in recent years EFDSS has at last been making efforts to do things right, and is publicly stating the importance of musical traditions in all of the society's activities.
The EFDSS is worth supporting if only for the sake of the unique (overused word, but I do mean unique) Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. Join now!

The Bodleian Library's Broadside Ballad collection contains images of hundreds of original ballad sheets held in the library. The texts are not digitised, and some of the words can be rather difficult to make out - but only because the 17th / 18th / 19th century original is not always in mint condition!
Includes versions of several songs recorded or performed by Magpie Lane - including Stuff Your Guts, Oxford City, and Woodstock Town.

A similar site based on Scottish collections is the National Library of Scotland's Word on the Street site. This also includes text transcriptions of the songs and ballads - although beware, not all of these transcriptions is 100% accurate.

Another useful site for sheet music (including plenty of songs which entered the tradition) is the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection - check out the original version of The Swiss Boy and be thankful we know it today as a dance tune, not a song!

Copper Family fan? Then visit www.thecopperfamily.com  - gives the words to all the songs in their songbook.

Want to learn some more English tunes, or find something out about the musicians who played them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? You need Johnny Adams's Village Music Project, which has a growing number of tune collections available in abc format.

And then, of course, you need to visit Chris Walshaw's abc homepage to find out everything about this incredibly handy music notation system - and to download one of several shareware readers available.

West Gallery Music is the music sung and played in English country churches and chapels in the 1700s and early 1800s. Over the last thirty years a great deal of research has been carried out into the people (mainly ordinary working men and women) who composed and performed West Gallery music; and there are now enthusiastic groups all over the country who get together to perform this stirring, vigorous music. To learn more, visit one of these sites:

West Gallery Music Association

Sue Glover's Gallery Music site

Tony Singleton's West Gallery Resources

For more on the closely related American Shape Note / Sacred Harp singing traditions see www.fasola.org 

To find the text of Psalms in a variety of metrical versions - Sternhold & Hopkins, Tate & Brady etc. - visit Music for the Church of God

Concertina anorak? Have a look at

The Concertina Library
a digital online reference library for all concertinas, with contributions from many expert authors: instruction books, sheet music, history documents, patents, technical papers, and new research articles by leading scholars, plus links to other concertina websites.
 - excellent new site at www.concertina.com

Concertina.net

Chris Timson's Concertina FAQ

Donald Nichols' Squeeze Links

For repairs and maintenance on my instruments I always go to Steve Dickinson at C. Wheatstone & Co.