The BBC Folk Music Collection

Abstract

In a sense I write under false pretences because the BBC possesses no special archives devoted to folk music. For the purposes of broadcasting, the BBC began to make recordings at the end of 1931 and over the last thirty years has built up a general Sound Archives of some 30,000 accession numbers: recordings mainly selected from its own broadcast programmes, ranging from variety to grand opera, from the squeak of a door to full-length radio drama, from the noisy actuality of war commentaries to the stately sonority of Coronation ceremonies.