The Full English (folk music archive) facts for kids
The Full English is a cool project that started in 2013. It's all about saving and sharing old English folk songs and tunes. The project makes these amazing old collections easy to find online. It's supported by groups like the Heritage Lottery Fund. In 2013, a group of folk singers also made an album and went on tour using "The Full English" name to help promote the project.
Discovering Old English Folk Music
The Full English archive opened in June 2013. It's like a giant online library for traditional English music and dance. It has over 44,000 records and more than 58,000 digital pictures of old notes and songs. It's the biggest digital collection of its kind in the world!
This amazing archive brings together 19 different collections. These collections were put together by famous people who loved folk music. Some of these collectors include Lucy Broadwood, Percy Grainger, Cecil Sharp, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
The project has two main parts. The first part was making all the old handwritten songbooks available online. This way, anyone can search through them. The second part, which is still being worked on, is to make things even easier. They are adding written notes for the music and words, plus audio recordings of the tunes. You can search the archive in many ways. For example, you can look for a song by its title, who collected it, or where it was found.
The Full English Band
A folk singer and expert named Fay Hield was asked to create new music. She used songs and tunes from the archive for her new arrangements. She gathered a group of musicians to play at the launch party in June 2013. After playing together, the musicians decided to keep going. They made an album and went on tour as "The Full English" band. Their goal was to help tell more people about the archive.
The band toured 11 towns and cities in England in the autumn of 2013. Besides Fay Hield, other musicians included Seth Lakeman, Martin Simpson, Nancy Kerr, Sam Sweeney, Rob Harbron, and Ben Nicholls.
On their tour, The Full English group performed folk songs from the archive and other traditional sources. They were very successful! In 2014, they won two awards at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. They won for best group and best album.
