The Full English – English traditional music archive online

The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library has made available online its complete digital music archive of the collections made by the great collectors of English traditional music in the early 20th century. Not only the material collected by Vaughan Williams himself, but also that by Cecil Sharp, George Butterworth, Percy Grainger, Sabine Baring-Gould and Herefordshire’s Ella Mary Leather and others.

The materials available to listen to and view include 44,000 records and 58,000 digitised images.

This has to be a Jolly Good Thing as it will make the riches of English traditional and folk music much more accessible to those who currently think that traditional music in the British Isles means Celtic music and that English music doesn’t exist, or at best is nothing more than stuff for morris dancers to prance about and wave hankies to.