Song searching just got easier…

English Dance and Song Summer 2019

This article was published in English Dance and Song, the magazine of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The world’s oldest magazine for folk music and dance, EDS was first published in 1936 and is essential reading for anyone with a passion for folk arts. 

Song searching just got easier…

Laura Smyth, EFDSS’ Library and Archives Director, presents the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library’s latest resource: The Folk Song Subject Index.

When the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML) welcomes a new song researcher to the library, there’s a high chance that the first thing they’ll ask is “Do you have any songs about…?”. It may seem obvious, but this type of enquiry isn’t as straightforward as one might think.

Over the years, the VWML and scholars such as Steve Roud have been diligently indexing folk songs found in books, manuscripts, records, CDs, and so on. But until now, this has focused on data such as the title, first line, performer’s name and date collected. This makes looking for folk songs about a subject technically tricky.

You may think that full text searching would be the easy answer, but the words of folk songs are not usually couched in standard natural language. They are poetical, allegorical and imaginative. So, for example, there are many songs which feature a suicide, but none of them mention the word because the character in question 'throws herself into the briny deep'. So far, we’ve relied on staff expertise and specialist books in order to satisfy these kinds of queries. We do pretty well in general, but it’s not been ideal. Hence the reason why, over the last year, the VWML and a team of dedicated volunteers have been working to create a solution to this problem: our new Folk Song Subject Index (FSSI).

The FSSI is a free online resource which can be found on the library’s website. It allows users to finally search for folk songs by their subject – what the song is about and what it features. By using this tool, you can search for overarching abstract concepts within the songs, such as female agency, as well as more concrete items or features like ships and drums. Each unique song, as based on the Roud number, has its own entry. This entry functions as a master entry for the song and also contains a brief synopsis, as well as historical information, notes and references, making it easier than ever to browse through your results.

Once you’ve found suitable songs in the FSSI, you can follow a link back to our online archive allowing you to explore variants of the song online.

It’s not been an easy process. We can’t just add any old keyword – they’ve had to be carefully considered and managed. We’ve done this through the simultaneous development of a thesaurus of preferred keywords. This thesaurus allows us to specify which keywords we are going to use in our indexes, particularly when there are synonyms, for example, should we use ‘daffodils’ or ‘narcissi’? The thesaurus also helps to group keywords into hierarchies; ‘roses’ and ‘daffodils’ are types of the broader term ‘flowers’. By using a thesaurus to structure our terms – and a bit of technical wizardry from our web developer, Richard Butterworth – it means that the user can now conduct a search for ‘flowers’ and retrieve all songs indexed with roses and daffodils automatically (as well as narcissi), saving the user from having to think of all possible keywords and doing multiple individual searches. Users can also browse the thesaurus to get an idea of the kinds of subjects that feature in our folk songs and have fun exploring the songs that way.

The development of the index and thesaurus has been part of a one-year project, which began in May 2018. Through generous funding from the National Folk Music Fund and the Marc Fitch Fund, we were able to employ a web developer to create the online interface, a thesaurus manager to oversee the development of the thesaurus and a project officer to index and also to assist a team of dedicated volunteers, without whom the project would not have come to fruition. Many of the volunteers are folk song enthusiasts who have been able to put their expertise in folk song to good use.

It’s a huge achievement, but there is still much more to do – the FSSI currently contains about 600 song entries but there are currently over 30,000 unique songs as listed in the Roud index. Although the main part of the project has officially ended, we are still adding to the index and will be doing for the foreseeable future. So do take a look at this free online resource – and happy song searching!

To explore the resource and find out more, go to: vwml.org/subjectindex

I would like to express my thanks to the following people who helped to make this project a success: Volunteer indexers: Clare Dyer-Smith Colin Bargery Derek Caudwell Elizabeth Boakes Emilia Will Elizabeth Willetts Gabriela Henríquez Hilary Fraser John-Francis Goodacre Lorna Rutherford Michael Taft Mitch Park Pam Bishop Peter Wood Rod Stradling Shan Graebe Victoria Lane Will Johnston-Wood VWML project team and advisers: Natalie Bevan Martin Nail Richard Butterworth Steve Roud Funders: National Folk Music