you must credit Ken Sheffield and the CDSS Online Library;
you may print and redistribute the dances, and build upon Ken’s work;
all new work must carry the same license, so any derivatives must also be non-commercial in nature.
Collections history
In 1982 Ken Sheffield published the first volume of From Two Barns. The plan was to produce a book of ten dances each year for ten years; other activities got in the way, as they tend to do, but ten books were eventually published, the last one in 2005.
Volume 10 includes a short history titled “Why From Two Barns,” which explains the title of the series, and how and why they happened.
Ken began work on The Century Collection before the publication of From Two Barns Vol. 10, in 2005. He passed away in 2017 before the book was completed, but all the dances and notes he planned to include remained. Since that time, they have been thoroughly researched and edited by Frances White and Diana Triplow in order to present the complete collection at last. During the intervening years some of the dances have been researched and published by others, and many of these are now well-known and popular. However, the collection is presented in its entirety here, as Ken had intended.
Ken Sheffield Biography
How Did I Get Mixed Up with Folk Dancing?
Apart from the “Music and Movement” programme on the Schools Broadcast, pre-war when I was seven or eight, I was not involved in any sort of dance activity. However at a choir supper, just after the Queen had been square dancing in Canada, the entertainment was a session square dancing run by a gentleman who organized a club in Aylesbury. From then on I used to spend Thursday evenings at this club.
A few weeks later I started off on my old motorbike to go roller skating at Princes Risborough and was obliged to take to a layby by a car on the wrong side of the road. The layby was about two inches deep in white mud which had run down off the Chiltern Hills. Both the bike and I changed colour! Even my black helmet was white!
Returning home to change I found my friend Bob, who had arranged to take his girlfriend, Betty, to a dance at Long Crendon, waiting for me. Unfortunately her mother would not let her go unless her elder sister went as well. He had arranged for me to partner the elder sister. The girls went off on the bus from Quainton to Long Crendon and we took off on the bike.
To Bob’s chagrin it was a folk dance, to 78 rpm records, played on a wind-up gramophone. Shortly after this escapade Bob and Betty split up leaving me with two new activities, which have endured for over sixty years, English folk dancing and, shortly afterwards, a wife.
Ken Sheffield
February, 2011
The Century Collection by Ken Sheffield, edited by Frances White and Diana Triplow
This online collection of approximately 100 English country dances comes from some earlier collections (e.g., Thompson; Wilson; Wright) as well as dances composed by Ken Sheffield. Both the music notation as well as instructions for the dance are provided.