The Full English (folk music archive) facts for kids
The Full English is a cool project that started in 2013. It's all about finding and saving old English folk songs and dance tunes. The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) runs this project. They want to make it easy for everyone to explore these old songs online. It's like a giant digital library for traditional English music! A group of musicians even made an album and went on tour to share these amazing songs. This project gets help from groups like the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Discovering Old English Folk Music
The Full English launched its huge online library in June 2013. It has over 44,000 records and more than 58,000 digital pictures of old music sheets. This makes it the biggest online collection of traditional music and dance tunes in the world! The archive brings together 19 different collections. These were gathered by famous people who loved folk music, like Lucy Broadwood, Percy Grainger, Cecil Sharp, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
The project has two main parts. The first part was to make all these old music papers available online. This way, anyone can search through them. The second part is still happening. It's about making the music even easier to use. This includes adding written versions of the music and words. They are also adding audio recordings of the tunes. You can search the archive in many ways. For example, you can look for a song by its title, the person who collected it, or where it was found.
It's thought that about 15,000 people will be involved with this project by the time it's finished. This includes kids learning old folk songs and dances. It also includes people who go to live concerts of this music.
Bringing Folk Songs to Life
The EFDSS asked a folk singer and expert named Fay Hield to help. She was asked to create new music using songs from the archive. She put together a group of musicians to play at the launch party in June 2013. After they created a set of songs, the musicians decided to do more. They made an album and went on a tour. They called themselves The Full English, just like the project. Their goal was to help tell people about the amazing online archive.
The tour visited 11 towns and cities across England in autumn 2013. Besides Fay Hield, other musicians included Seth Lakeman, Martin Simpson, Nancy Kerr, Sam Sweeney, Rob Harbron, and Ben Nicholls. On the tour, The Full English group played folk songs from the archive. They also played other traditional songs. Later, in 2014, they won two awards at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. They won for best group and best album.
