Welcome to the Take Six website, a searchable database of the manuscript archives of six of the UK's most prominent folksong collectors. Each of the archives have been completely catalogued and digitised, and you can search the catalogues and view the digitised documents here. Most of the documents are songs and tunes, but you can also access other manuscript items such as dances or correspondence.
How to use the Take Six archive
If you are looking for a particular song and you know the title, or part of the title, simply type in relevant keywords in the 'Search for' box. For example, to find 'Banks of the Sweet Dundee' type 'Banks Dundee' and change the 'all fields' dropdown box to 'title', then click Submit Search. This will find all the entries under that title, but folk song titles are notoriously variable, so if you want to find all versions, see under 'Roud Numbers' in 'advanced and more complex searches'. You can also use the same method to search by name of performer, place of collection and so on - just use the drop-down menu to set the appropriate field. Having done the first search, you will be presented with a summary list of entries (see below).
Help for advanced and more complex searches
Understading your search results
Your search results will come in the form of a list of entries - click on the title for which you would like to see more information, and it will open up the full record, including the thumbnails of any associated images. To see a full version of an image, just click on the thumbnail. Click the title again to close the entry. If you are only interested in some of the items in your search results, click the check box on the left for the ones you wish to keep, and then click 'Retain selected items' (which appears when you have selected some of the results). This will remove the un-ticked items from your list.
Browsing the collections
If you would like to browse by collection, rather than searching for a specific term, click 'open tree view' in the top right. This opens the full list of items in the six collections, allowing you to browse by collection and volume.
Who are the collectors represented in Take Six?
The six song collectors, Janet Blunt, George Butterworth, Francis Collinson, George Gardiner, Anne Gilchrist and Henry Hammond, collected over five thousand songs, tunes, dances and other folk art related emphemera, and recorded them in their notebooks and files. All of these documents have been digitised, forming an online database of over twenty-two thousand images.
