Peter Kennedy Collection
Number of items in collection: 842
Short description:
Recordings in this collection can be played by anyone.
These are a small portion - approximately 150 hours of a total of around 1500 - of the field recordings Peter Kennedy (1922-2006) made during the four decades in which he was very active "in the field": 1940, 1950, 1960 and 1970. He began collecting songs and dances, encouraged by folk collector Alan Lomax, in order to demonstrate that the folklore tradition was still alive in Britain and Ireland.
Long description:
Recordings in this collection can be played by anyone.
These are a small portion - approximately 150 hours of a total of around 1500 - of the field recordings Peter Kennedy (1922-2006) made during the four decades in which he was very active "in the field": 1940, 1950, 1960 and 1970. He began collecting songs and dances, encouraged by folk collector Alan Lomax, in order to demonstrate that the folklore tradition was still alive in Britain and Ireland.
The British Library also holds Peter Kennedy's photographs. With a grant from the National Folk Music Fund we have been able to catalogue them onto the Library's Archives and Manuscripts catalogue and to make selections available with the recordings as part of this online collection. The images were scanned with the help of Topic Records.
The recordings available here are exact representations of the archival reel-to-reel tapes, no audio was edited out. In this way they can serve as an interesting complement to material published by Folktrax, run by Peter Kennedy, and by Topic Records.