Useful Links

Get Song BPM

https://getsongbpm.com/dancing

Find songs for Ballroom and Latin dances. Find Competition and slow/training tempo songs for Ballroom and Latin dances whether you are an amateur or a Professional dancer.

The Instep Research Team

www.InstepRT.co.uk

The Instep Research Team was formed in 1980 by six members of the Newcastle Cloggies who, living in the north-east of England,  felt that there should be older clog dancers surviving in the area who remained to be discovered.  They set about systematically searching for dancers and recording their findings.

From 1980 until 1988 the IRT published the magazine INSTEP, devoted to clog and step related material. It is hoped to make these available here as a free online resource in the near future.

The team’s main outlet is, however, the Newcastle Series, which over the years has published aver 40 titles.  The steps published in these booklets are all notated using Newcastle Notation, a robust system for accurately notating step and clog dance. The system is available here as a free online resource.

Likewise, the complete  Newcastle Series has been digitised and is also available here free online resource. It is not intended to produce further hard copy notations and future collections will be made available online.

Over the years the personnel and methodologies of the IRT have of course changed, however the basic ethos has not.  The aims and objectives of IRT are:

  1. To undertake research into clog and step dancing;
  2. To publish the results of that research and, as appropriate, the research of others;
  3. To teach clog and step dance and to encourage participation clog and step dancing generally.

http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/winter.htm

The manuscript compiled in 1848-1850 by fiddle player and shoemaker William Winter (1774-1861) has over 470 separate dance, song and other tunes. It is stored in Halsway Manor archives.

Vaughan Williams Memorial Library

www.vwml.org.uk

The essential folk resource. The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML) is England’s national folk music and dance archive, an essential resource for anybody interested in the folk arts. Founded in 1930 as the Cecil Sharp Library and housing Cecil Sharp’s personal book collection (which helped lay the foundations of the modern folk revival), it is now a multi-media library of distinction, containing books, pamphlets, periodicals, press cuttings, broadsides, paintings, photographs, slides, artefacts, records, reel-to-reel tapes, phonograph cylinders, videos, cine films, compact discs, audio cassettes and more.

British Library – World and traditional music collection.

https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/world-and-traditional-music

One of the world’s largest collections of recordings variously described as traditional, folk or world music.

Bob and Jacqueline Patten English Folk Music Collection

https://sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Bob-and-Jacqueline-Patten-Collection#

A very large collection of field recordings of traditional songs, music, storytelling and customs made between 1969 to 2001 mainly in the south west of England, in Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. The collection features unique performances of West Gallery Music and Shape Note singing, English carols during house-visiting wassailing and children’s rhymes, songs and games.

Wren Music –  Folk arts and education

http://www.wrenmusic.co.uk/

Wren is a music charity with over 30 years’ experience in delivering all aspects of community music. We are based in Devon but provide our services in the wider South West as well as work with partners nationally and internationally.

GlosTrad

http://glostrad.com/

The “Single Gloucester” project, which paved the way for the Glostrad site, was born out of a wish to make the traditional songs and music collected in the county more accessible and in a form which could easily be used by, for example, schools, choirs, the folk scene, researchers and so on.

Mainly Norfolk – Folk resource

https://www.mainlynorfolk.info/folk/

English folk and other good music.

Peter Kennedy

www.folktrax-archive.org

Peter Kennedy’s website archived as it was when he died.

https://www.vwml.org/images/VWMLASSETS/PDFs/peter-kennedy-discography.pdf

Peter Kennedy’s Published Recordings of British and Irish Traditional Music and related material: an annotated discography by Dr. Reg Hall

Sabine Baring-Gould

www.sbgsongs.org

Broadside Ballads

http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Search over 30,000 ballads and , if they are there , view them as images. You can search by Roud number.

Street Ballads of Victorian England

http://speccoll.library.kent.edu/music/ballads/streetballads.html

A collection of 175 broadsides in the library of Kent State University, Ohio.

The Word on the Street

http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/index.html

The National Library of Scotland’s collection of images of 911 broadsides.

Folk Witness

http://www.folkwitness.co.uk/

An excellent blog dedicated to the world of folk music.