Major National Folk Music Web Sites

Martin Nail's English folk and traditional music on the Internet is probably the best folk music site on the net. Use this to find almost anything relating to English music or song from folk clubs to tunes. This is a nice fast loading site.

The Radio 2 Folk and Accoustic page gives another superb set of links and an extensive artist database. The page is jam packed full of features which may make it a little slow at times if you don't have a broad band connection.

For social dance and English ceilidh information go straight to Martin Kiff's Webfeet pages . The site we originally recommended for morris dance seems to have vanished from the web but the three morris organisations have set up their own joint site . For Irish set dances try William Lynch's Set Dancing News.

The EFDSSis the national organisation for folk music, song and dance in the England. They also maintain the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library which contains records of the major collections and provides extensive on-line indexes. The paper based Folk Directory which the society published for over 35 years has been discontinued after an abortive move into web based publishing. Luckily there is an independently published paper directory available called Direct Roots. Of course music, dance and song are not the sum total of the traditional arts so don't forget The Society for Storytelling and the Folklore Society.

Rod Stradling's electronic magazine Musical Traditions is packed with material on English and Irish traditional music. Rod has done an excellent job structuring the site for fast loading but there is so much superb material that your phone bill will still suffer if you have a pay as you go connection.

Its not always easy to find folk music and song CDs away from the sales stalls at the major festivals. Surprisingly Amazon.co.uk have a fair selection of the more commercialy oriented UK material, a lot of the more esoteric imports and even material from labels like Veteran and Old Hat on special order. You can find out which of the CDs that we have reviewed are availble from Amazon here. Making your Amazon purchases through these links provides us with a small commission which helps to subsidise the running costs of this site.

A handful of folk based web sites, including ourselves, are starting to provide news feeds. These can be used with news aggregators such as NewsGator or as smart links with the Firefox browser. Martin Kiff of Webfeet is producing an index of folk related feeds.