For readers interested in music history, BBC Radio 3 offers the Early Music show, "[a]n exploration of early music, looking at early developments in musical performance and composition both in Britain and abroad." The show features interviews, profiles of historic musicians, and tales about eighteenth-century opera company rivalries. In one recent episode, host Lucie Skeaping interviews renowned...

The team behind Beets describes this tool as a "media library management system for obsessive-compulsive music geeks." Beets allows users to sync their music collection to a database called MusicBrainz, a metadata library. In doing so, users both improve the MusicBrainz database and, in turn, are able to access a variety of information about their music. MusicBrainz provides provide listeners with...

For two decades, Ben Gray Lumpkin travelled around the state of Colorado collecting folk songs. Lumpkin was a professor of English at the University of Colorado, and over this time period he recorded approximately 2000 performances by 192 individuals. This delightful digital collection created by the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries offers curious visitors a sampling of these...

If you have ever had a penchant to check out an ancient flageolet or a historic bass horn, this delightful online collection from the Birmingham Conservatoire Historical Instrument Collection is just the ticket. The project was developed by Professor George Caird and his colleagues at Birmingham City University, and funding for the project was provided by Arts & Humanities Research Council. From...

The nonprofit Birthplace of Country Music is dedicated to providing engaging content and learning materials about the country music legacy of the Bristol region. Since it was last featured in the 01-21-2011 issue of the Scout Report, the site has added a "Museum from Home" section with a variety of virtual resources. Country music has a number of historical "hearth" areas, but perhaps none is...

Readers interested in listening to "B-Side" records containing social movement messages will delight in this Black Gospel collection, last featured in the 06-29-2018 Scout Report. In February 2005, Baylor University English professor Robert Darden penned an essay for The New York Times op-ed section entitled "Gospel's Got the Blues." In this essay, Darden noted that although gospel music has...

There are few things as fine as a ballad, and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford happens to have over 30,000 in its collection. Broadside ballads were popular songs, and they were generally sold for a penny (or less) in villages around Britain between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Many of these ballads have been digitized and placed on this website for use by music...

The ethnomusicologist Rolf Killius has recorded traditional Indian music for the British Library for more than a dozen years, and the Archival Sound Recordings website for the Library has samples of some of the folk, devotional, and ritual music of India that he has recorded. The website allows the visitor to listen to the music by location and the locations to choose from are in the middle of the...

Can you locate a Cockney accent? What about the location of different traditional types of music in Britain? Both of these tasks are possible and quite enjoyable via the British Library's Sound Maps website. Visitors are encouraged to use the interactive maps here to explore nine different sound clusters, including Music from India, Wildlife recordings, and Accent & Dialects. This last one is a...

A broadside is also called a "penny ballad," and it is a single sheet of paper printed on one side. It was a great way for people to get the word out about their cause or organization, especially in the 19th century. This collection from the Enoch Pratt Free Library brings together broadsides related to life in Maryland primarily between 1860 and 1865. These ditties and other pieces of doggerel...