Take 6

In 2007 the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) awarded a grant of £154,500 to the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) for an 18 month pilot project entitled Take 6. The grant was to enable the EFDSS to archive and conserve six of its major folk song and dance manuscript collections and make them more widely accessible to the public, particularly to the communities where they were first collected. This would be achieved through internet access as well as education and community projects in Lancashire, Hampshire and London

Other counties covered by the Take 6 project include Oxfordshire, Sussex, Norfolk, Yorkshire and Dorset.

The six collections were:

• The Janet Blunt Collection: 800 items – songs, country dances and morris dance tunes – collected in West Adderbury, Oxfordshire, in 1907-1919
• The George Butterworth Collection: 460 items – songs, dances and dance tunes – collected all over southern England and Yorkshire between 1906 and 1913
• The Francis Collinson Collection: 360 songs collected in the southern counties of England as a result of his involvement in the BBC’s Country Magazine radio programme in the 1940s and early 50s
• The George Gardiner Collection: over 1600 folk songs collected mainly in Hampshire in the period 1905 to 1909
• The Anne G. Gilchrist Collection: 214 folk songs plus children’s singing games Lancashire morris tunes, songs from customs, sea shanties, carols and street cries, all collected from the 1890s to the 1920s, mainly in Lancashire
• The Hammond Collection: over 900 folk songs collected mainly in Dorset in the years 1905 to 1907 by two brothers, Henry and Robert Hammond

In February 2011 the Sabine Baring-Gould Folk Song archive, which was created by Wren Music as part of the Devon Tradition project, was added to the Take 6 digital archive. This project was also funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and ran from July 2009 to February 2011. The collection was designed to fit alongside the Take 6 website, and can be searched and used in the same way.

All seven collections will now form part of The Full English digital archive, launched in June 2013.

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Supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund and Devon Tradition