Additions to the archives
We are continually updating the archives, and the indexes on which they are built.
Digitisation projects add further collections to the archives, which are made available online when budgets allow.
Gypsy and Traveller Voices
Our archives contain many songs sung by Gypsies and Travellers. This project aims to make these songs more accessible to the communities from which they came, and highlight their contribution to the history and development of folk song, all the while centring the voices of the communities.
Phase One in 2023 involved the creation of a resource, written by Romani poet and academic Dr Jo Clement (University of Northumbria).
You can read more about it and download the resource as a PDF here.
The team has begun working on phase two of the project, which will involve the creation of a film. Please return here, and keep an eye on our news bulletins and social media for
updates.
Part of a Gypsy and Traveller Voices in UK Music Archives project, led by Dr Hazel Marsh (University of East Anglia) together with Dr Esbjorn Wettermark (University of Sheffield) and Tiffany Hore, Director of Library and Archives at the English Folk Dance and Song Society and funded by the University of East Anglia’s AHRC Impact Acceleration Account.
Folk Song Subject Index
Our exciting project to create an online subject index for folk songs along with a thesaurus of keywords went live in 2019, and continues to be developed and expanded.
Thanks to generous funding from the National Folk Music Fund and the Marc Fitch Fund, this important resource is freely available via the VWML’s website alongside existing indexes and catalogues.
Background
In recent years there has been great progress indexing, cataloguing and making available our folk song heritage. The Roud Folk Song indexes and VWML online make it possible to search for songs by title, first line, place, singer, and classification numbers (such as the Roud number) helping us to bring together multiple versions of the same song.
Yet there is a big hole in our achievements so far – approximately 30% of the enquiries which are received by the VWML are for songs by subject or by type (e.g. harvest songs). It may be thought that full-text searching is the answer to this problem, 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' or 'falls on his sword'. So in 2018 VWML started project to create a subject index for folk songs, along with a related thesaurus of approved terms.
The subject index is a publicly accessible online index to aid the finding and retrieval of traditional folk songs based on subject keywords. This index also functions as a master index, devoting a record to each song and including a brief synopsis of the song, notes on the history, and a sample text where possible. This master song index then links to variants of the song as found in the VWML and Roud folk song indexes.
The subject index is supported by a hierarchical thesaurus. The thesaurus identifies authorised keywords used in the subject index, along with their synonyms, and broader and narrower related terms. Deciding authority terms is important because it indicates to users the preferred terms on which to search, e.g. coal miners instead of colliers, etc., and will therefore make for more accurate and efficient searching.
These two resources are freely available to the public on this website. No other index like this is currently in existence. Although this project has by no means created a comprehensive index, it does at least lay the foundation for an important addition to the study and research of folk songs across the English-speaking world.
This resource is a work in progress. There are over 30,000 Roud numbers in existence, and this index now contains more than 1000 song entries (see Thousandth Song in the Folk Song Subject Index, August 2021). Index terms have usually been selected from a single version of the song, but we hope to include subject terms for song variants soon.
Search the index now
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