More than 3,000 recordings of folk songs, tunes and stories collected in the Asher Valley over seven decades have been digitised and made freely available to listen to. The collection, gathered mainly by the late schoolteacher and collector Arthur Penrose, had been stored on reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes in the basement of Wrenhaven Central Library.
Penrose began recording in 1956, carrying a heavy tape machine on the back of his motorcycle to farmhouses, pubs and village halls. Over the next forty years he recorded farm workers, fishermen and their families singing work songs, ballads and lullabies, many of which had never been written down. His family donated the tapes to the library after his death.
Some of these singers were born in the 1870s. When you play the tapes, you are hearing songs as they were sung before the radio arrived.
So said the library's sound archivist, Delphine Okoro-Marsh, who led the three-year project. Many of the tapes had become brittle and had to be baked at a low temperature before they could be played once and transferred. Volunteers then spent thousands of hours listening, writing down lyrics and identifying singers and places, often with help from their descendants.
New life for old songs
The recordings can be searched by village, singer or song title on computers at the library and at all branch libraries. Some local musicians have already started learning the material. Fiddler Rhys Tregenza, who plays in a Millbrook ceilidh band, said he had found three dance tunes his grandfather used to hum. "I had always assumed they were lost," he said.
The project was funded by a €180,000 heritage grant. To mark its completion, the library will hold a free evening concert next month at which young musicians will perform songs from the archive alongside the original recordings.