Vaughan Williams Memorial Library

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library is the library and archive of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), located in the society's London headquarters, Cecil Sharp House. It hosts a number of the library's indexes to manuscript collections, together with the Roud Folk Song Index. The library contains manuscripts, field notes, transcriptions etc of a number of distinguished collectors of folk music and dance traditions in the British Isles. According to A Dictionary of English Folklore, "... by a gradual process of professionalization the VWML has become the most important concentration of material on traditional song, dance, and music in the country." It is named after Ralph Vaughan Williams, composer, collector and past president of the EFDSS.

Prior to that it was the Cecil Sharp Library, since his papers comprised the bulk of the holdings, but over the years the library has added literature, sound and manuscript collections of other eminent folklorists and collectors such as Lucy Broadwood, Janet Blunt, Anne Gilchrist, George Butterworth and George Gardiner; copies of the papers and notebooks of Sabine Baring-Gould, Ralph Vaughan Williams and James Madison Carpenter; and the field recordings of Percy Grainger, Mike Yates and the BBC Folk Music Archive.