Opie collection of children's games & songs
Number of items in collection: 143
Short description:
Recordings in this collection can be played by anyone.
The Opie Collection of Children's Games and Songs is a set of recordings made by Iona Opie between 1969 and 1983. Iona and her husband, Peter, dedicated their working lives to documenting children's play, folklore, language and literature and published several influential works, most notably The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959). Their audio archive consists of 85 open reel and cassette tapes recorded by Iona during research for The Singing Game (1985) and deposited with the British Library in 1998.
Oral history recordings provide valuable first-hand testimony of the past. The views and opinions expressed in oral history interviews are those of the interviewees, who describe events from their own perspective. The interviews are historical documents and their language, tone and content might in some cases reflect attitudes that could cause offence in today’s society.
Long description:
Recordings in this collection can be played by anyone.
The Opie Collection of Children's Games and Songs is a set of recordings made by Iona Opie between 1969 and 1983. Iona and her husband, Peter, dedicated their working lives to documenting children's play, folklore, language and literature and published several influential works, most notably The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959). Their audio archive consists of 85 open reel and cassette tapes recorded by Iona during research for The Singing Game (1985) and deposited with the British Library in 1998.
Oral history recordings provide valuable first-hand testimony of the past. The views and opinions expressed in oral history interviews are those of the interviewees, who describe events from their own perspective. The interviews are historical documents and their language, tone and content might in some cases reflect attitudes that could cause offence in today’s society.
The collection includes recordings of children in playgrounds, parks and streets across the UK and a small number of interviews with older informants reflecting on play earlier in the 20th century. The recordings feature demonstrations of singing games, skipping and clapping songs and discussions of informal play. The sound quality varies as the recordings took place in a variety of locations and Iona deliberately sought to capture natural, unprepared and unrehearsed performances.
The recordings were digitised with funds provided by the AHRC Beyond Text programme as part of the collaborative project, Children’s Playground Games in the New Media Age.
Further information and access to additional recordings from complementary collections is available on the BL Learning Playtimes website.
All recordings on this site are governed by licence agreements.