Home page
New for August 2012!
We are proud to present 'The Gallery of Historic Dance and Tune Books'; an online gallery of 30 historic tune books with over 2000 scanned pages.
You can dive right in and start browsing through the books, or you can read through our introductory page which describes the books and gives biographies of some of the printers and publishers.
So, Ladies and Gentlemen, take your partners for...
Welcome to the website for the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library
VWML Online is the official website for the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, the library and
archive of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. It hosts a number of the library's indexes to manuscript collections, together with the Roud Folk Song Index. This site is very much in
the development stage and and will be up-graded and added to regularly over time.
The eventual goal is to host the library's catalogues and indexes to all collections.
The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of 146,000 references to songs that have been collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world. You can search on a single field or multiple fields. This index is growing all the time and updates will be posted on the site regularly. More details about the Roud index and how to search it can be found here.
The Collectors' indexes focus on the performers they met -- what their names were, where they were met or lived, when, and what was noted down from them (depending on the development of the site, this may be an actual song or tune title, or simply a manuscript reference). In the case of Cecil Sharp's index, we have also uploaded images from his photograph collection which will appear with the performer's record. (To see the whole gallery, click here).
All of the indexes and images contained are the copyright of the EFDSS, except the Roud Folk Song Index, the rights for which belong exclusively to Steve Roud.
If any errors are found or you wish to comment on the site, please email us at library@efdss.org.
Singers from the Sharp index
The traveller Betsy Holland pictured at Simonsbath, Somerset, England who sang 'Execution song' and others.
Laurel Wheeler (and family!) pictured at Rockbridge County, Virginia, USA who sang 'Lord Rendal' and others.
Eliza Woodberry pictured at Ash Priors, Somerset, England who sang 'The Saucy Sailor' and others.
