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Steve Gardham writes:
In April the Yorkshire Garland Group -committee members, Mike Parsey, Ray Padgett and myself- were successful in our bid to obtain Heritage Lottery Funding to set up our proposed Yorkshire Garland website. This aims to make available archive and new recordings of Yorkshire’s rich heritage of traditional singers, and also to provide a database of all Yorkshire songs in archives, books, recordings etc. Our remit is to present songs about Yorkshire people, places and events, and songs collected within the traditional boundaries of the county. 
In our first phase (two years) we intend to concentrate on traditional songs such as those in the Hudleston Collection, my own and others dotted around the county, and indeed held in other parts of the country. Having done most of my collecting in the 1960s and ‘70s I was pleasantly surprised and inspired by the number and quality of source singers still thriving in the county. We have what must be one of the strongest areas in the country for traditional song around Sheffield and Holmfirth with links to the farming community and based around the carol singing and hunting fraternities. With singers like Will Noble, John Cocking, Roger Hinchliffe, Gordon Hoyland and Brian Thorp still going strong and passing on their songs, South Yorkshire has few equals in the strength of the tradition. Most of these we recorded at Holmfirth Festival recently and these singers and their predecessors will certainly take pride of place on the website.
Though this area of the county is undoubtedly the song capital of Yorkshire, that certainly doesn’t mean that the rest of the county is barren of source singers. Eskdale has its John Greaves and my own East Riding still has its singers active in the East Riding Dialect Society. My work with local arts associations is also turning up previously unknown singers. I recently spent a pleasant afternoon in the village of Bossall near Stamford Bridge, recording 87 year-old Norman Creaser who not only still sang songs he learnt as a young farm hand, but actually writes his own songs about farming life, set to traditional tunes. Although we are helped by a solid band of volunteers offering their collections and technical expertise, we would be pleased to hear from anyone else interested in our project. Contacting surviving relatives for permission to use material is one area where we will definitely need help in the near future. Once we have established the website, we intend to apply for further funding to expand it into areas such as contemporary song, new composition, educational resources and an interactive map. In the first phase we are aiming to make available eighty recordings of traditional singers from all corners of the county; another important feature will be articles containing historical background to some of the songs and the singers. We do not intend to include anything of the Sheffield area carol tradition; simply because this already has its own website. For further information, email gardhams@hotmail.com or ray.padgett@blueyonder.co.uk Steve Gardham, Hull The above article first appeared in South Riding Folk Arts Network News 51 (summer 2006). The next meeting is at Harrogate on Sunday 17 September. For further details please contact Steve (email above). 
Gordon Hoyland with Steve Gardham
Photos by Ray Padgett
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