Recordings of folk music and traditions from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the United States, and Africa. Recordings from England include storytelling; traditional music and ballads; country dance, melodeon, concertina, and fiddle tunes; sea shanties; songs, stories, and customs of bargemen, gypsies, and Morris dancers; performances of mumming, soul-caking, and plough plays; Cornish songs and May Day customs; Skyport's London blues musicians; Old English minstrel songs; children's songs and games, including Pace-egg customs and plays; and an early phonograph recording made by Percy Grainger in 1906 of Lincolnshire singer Joseph Taylor (b. 1832 or 3). Recordings from Scotland include folk music, ballads, and storytelling in both English and Scottish Gaelic, children's rhymes, Scots tinker tales, fairy songs and charms, mouth music, and work songs. From Wales there are Welsh Romany gypsy harp and hornpipe tunes, Welsh penillion songs and stories, and a 1953 interview with Welsh coal miners in the Rhondda valley. Recordings from Ireland consist of folk tales and fiddle tunes, reels, and jigs, Belfast children's street songs and games, an Irish street-singer balladeer, and Jack tales. Recordings from the United States feature discussion and performances of various American folk classics, as well as collected folksongs of English origin from the southern Appalachian mountains. From Africa, there are field recordings of storytellers, including translations, about animals and people; Kenyan children's songs and games, and recordings of music, including stringed instruments such as harps, lutes, lyres, musical bows, and zithers from Central and Southern Africa, small plucked reed instruments, played widely throughout the continent, and performances of complex drum rhythms, flutes, pentatonic and hexatonic xylophones, and guitars.
