Resources on the Web

Song Indexes
1. Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle. The Traditional Ballad Index, www.csufresno.edu/folklore/BalladSearch.html - A biblio-discography of the Folk Songs of the English-Speaking World. Includes a brief description of the song along with listings of both older recordings and a wide variety of scholarly printed sources, with a focus on ballads. Highly recommend..

2. Steve Roud. The Roud Folk Song and Broadside Index, library.efdss.org/cgi-bin/query.cgi?.  A massive database of traditional songs and broadsides from a wide variety of English language sources, produced by Steve Roud, the librarian for Local Studies for Vaughn Williams Memorial Library. .
   

3. American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, American Memory Catalogs www.loc.gov/folklife - Home to more than 18,000 field recordings and other folk material of all kinds, this is our national archive of traditional musics as sung by many different native and immigrant cultures. A searchable index of the original card catalog of field recordings made from 1933-1955 is now available online at http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/afccards/afccards-home.html
   

4. Plymouth Library Song Index www.webopac.plymouth.gov.uk/cgi-bin/plymouth-cat.sh?. Search the index of over 60,000 song titles in nearly 2,000 songbooks held in the Plymouth, England Library. Covers all types of songs.

5. Charley Pennell, Discography of Bluegrass Sound Recordings, http://www.ibiblio.org/hillwilliam/BGdiscography/   Includes listings for 78, 45, and 33 rpm disks, as well as cassettes and CD. Pennell, a library cataloger at North Carolina State Univ. has been working on the discography for more than 10 years, and the website includes numerous tables arranged by label, performer, and song titles. A keyword searching feature is also available. Scanned images of various recordings are also displayed.

6. Banjo Newsletter, Cummulative Tablature Index.   www.banjonews.com/tabindex.html, Annapolis MD, 1973--. An index to 40 years of 5 string banjo tablature for all styles. Includes many fiddle tunes.

7. Sing Out Magazine Index, www.singout.org/ - Sing Out!, the premier folk music magazine, now more than 50 years old, has a complete listing of all songs published during this time. The magazine also maintains the Sing Out Resource Center, which houses thousands of items and this resource is available to members. An Index to more than 2500 books with some 48,000 song entries in this collection are now available thru a database developed at Oberlin College. This Folk Song Index, is now available at www.oberlin.edu/library/con/singout.html.

Tunes - Primarily Indexes
1. Andrew Kuntz's The Fiddler's Companion www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/. An index with more than 30,000 entries to tunes from Celtic, British and American traditions. Includes both print and recorded sources, along with ABC notation files for more than 3,000 of the tunes. A CD-ROM version is also available.

2. Alan Ng's Tunography, www.irishtune.info. An impressive website that indexes both books and recordings of Irish tunes. Includes extensive information on alternate titles and provides details on many recordings for which the titles of tunes are problematic, such as medleys that often do not give full listing of the individual tunes played.

3. James Stewart, An Index to Traditional Instrumental Tunes, www.ceolas.org/tunes/TuneIndex. This digital index to traditional instrumental music collections contains some 55,000 entries and covers all the major tune collections, such as O'Neills, Cole, etc. as well as many lesser known collections. Includes type of tune (jig, hornpipe, etc.), keys and timings of titles.

Songs and Ballads: Lyrics, Broadsides and other Digital Resources
1. Greenhaus, Dick, et.al. The Digital Tradition, www.mudcat.org. A collection of lyrics and digitized music files for more than 8000 folk songs. Both keyword searching and title browsing is possible.

2. Alan Lomax, The Alan Lomax Collection, research.culturalequity.org, aims to provide both searching and browsable indexes for all of his many recording trips around the world. Currently about ten trips are now available with digital sound files, including his 1959-61 Southern United States collecting

3. The Bodleian Library,Broadside Ballads Project, www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/ballads.htm. The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads project makes digitised images of more than 30,000 broadsheets and ballads available to the research community.

4. Lesley Nelson, The Comtemplator's Website, www.contemplator.com. A great site with historical information and lyrics for most of the Child Ballads, as well as many other Anglo-American folk genres. Midi files are also available for many songs.

5. Bruce Olson, Roots of Folk: Old English, Scots, and Irish Songs and Tunes, www.csufresno.edu/folklore/Olson. - A massive and fascinating tour through the early publications and manuscripts that are the sources for many of the ballads and tunes that we now sing and play.

6. The Virtual Gramophone; Canadian Historical Sound Recordings, www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/gramophone - Documents all 78 rpm recordings of Canadian performers, including folk and traditional artists, such as Quebec fiddler, Joseph Allard. sound files in mp3 or wav format are available for most titles.

7. Stefan Wirz's American Music Illustrated Discography www.wirz.de/music/american.htm - Provides complete listing for selected labels of albums with scanned images, complete track listings, and information on reissues. Labels include Arhoolie, Biograph, JEMF, Kicking Mule, Piedmont, and many others.

8. National Library of Scotland, Broadsides Index www.nls.uk/broadsides/search.html - Searchable index to the more than 1000 broadsides in this Scottish collection, with scanned images available for all entries.

9. Levy Sheet Music Collection, www.levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/ - A massive sheet music collection with much turn of the century and earlier material now searchable on line to retrieve complete bibliographic information, including words to first lines. Most titles allow viewing of the original sheet music images.

10. Sheet Music Consortium, digital2.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic - As more and more old sheet music collections become digitised, this website now allows you to search nine different collection, including the Levy collection noted above, along with collections from Duke University, Indiana University and others.

11. Rod Smith's Traditional Music Library, www.traditionalmusic.co.uk - Has web reprints of some classic collections such as the Lomaxes' American Ballads and Folk Songs.

12. Cowpie Song Corral, www.roughstock.com/cowpie/songs/ - Provides search engine and lyrics for country songs.

13. Country Music Lyrics, www.hit-country-music-lyrics.com - Has Lyrics for more modern country performers.

14. Harry's Blues Lyrics and Tabs Online, blueslyrics.tripod.com . Has lyrics to more than 2800 Blues titles.

15. Song Texts of the Original Carter Family, www.bluegrasswest.com/ideas/carter.htm - Look here to find lyrics for many of the songs found in the vast repertoire of the Carter Family.

Tunes - digital images, transcriptions, and audio files
1. Fred Parcells, The Reel Book, www.thereelbook.com A collection of more than 1700 performances of Irish tunes transcribed in standard notation from a variety of sources including published recordings from the 20's thru the early 90's, pub sessions, and other venues. A small one time fee of $10. provides you with lifetime access to the scanned immages.

2. Robert M. Keller. The Dancing Master, 1651-1728: An Illustrated Compendium. www.izaak.unh.edu/nhltmd/indexes/dancingmaster/ - This website is a browsable and searchable database with page images and display of John Playford's complete works.

Artist/Performer Discographies
1. FolkLib Index, www.folklib.net - From the original FolkBook discographies for individual folk performers.

2. Folkmusic.org Artist Listings, www.folkmusic.org/artists/browse.html - An index to Folk Music Artists sites.

Print & Microform Indexes

These print reference resources can be found in many libraries worldwide, using the Worldcat search engine, and can often provide a wide variety of information on both older and more recent sources.
1. Brunnings, Florence, The Folk Song Index. Garland Publications, 1981. A comprehensive index to all the major folk song collections published prior to 1980. Includes recordings and folk song magazines such as Sing Out, as well as print anthologies. worldcat holdings.

2. Cohen, Norm. Traditional Anglo-American Folk Music: An Annotated Discography of Published Sound Recordings. New York, Garland Pub., 1994. A topically organized discography focusing on recordings that feature traditional Anglo-American material from both commericial and field recordings issued on LP's, Cassettes and CD's. Includes indexes to performers, titles with some cross-referencing, Laws and Child Ballad ID's, and record labels. worldcat holdings.

3. Dichter, Harry; and Elliott Shapiro. Handbook of Early American Sheet Music, 1768-1889. New York, Dover Publ. 1977/1941. Provides listings for all the major sheet music publishers, along with reproductions of some 75 pieces. Includes an index to titles, topics, authors, and publishers. worldcat holdings.

4. Dixon, Robert M. W. et.al. Blues & gospel records, 1890-1943. Oxford, England. 4th ed., Oxford Univ. Press, 1997. More than a 1000 pages of discographic information organized by performer and ordered by date of recording sessions, with each listing including matrix numbers and orig. issue info. Appearance of artists as accompanyists or side performers is also listed, both for with other blues performers and also for side performer appearances with non blues groups. A title and side performer index is also included. worldcat holdings.

5. Luchinsky, Ellen, The Song Index of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. New York, Garland Publishing, 1998. A two volume index to all the song folios in the Enoch Pratt Collection. worldcat holdings.

6. An Index to Printed Sources of Folk Dance Tunes from the United States & the British Isles. Berea, KY, North American Imprints, 1995. worldcat holdings.

7. Keller, Kate Van Winkle, & Carolyn Rabson, The National Tune Index, New York, University Music Editions, 1980. This microfiche index to mostly 18th century and earlier publications includes titles, first line text, and several forms of incipit indexes. Most major research Universities will have copies of this massive index to early British & American music material. It is now available on the web at www.colonialdancing.org/Easmes/ as part of a larger index to early American musics.
8. Meade, Guthrie T.; with Dick Spottswood and Douglas S. Meade Country Music Sources: A Biblio-discography of Commercially Recorded Traditional Music. Chapel Hill, NC, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2002. A massive index to both recordings and printed material that focuses on traditional and older material. Organized into four broad sections (Ballads, Songs, Religious Songs, and Instrumental Music) with numerious sub-sections listing titles, each of which provides a uniqued Discographic ID, similar to the Laws Bibliographic IDs published. Recording information includes dates, location recorded, original matrix, and records issued. Additional info is available on composer copyrights, different labels issued along with references to print sources and some recent reissues. library worldcat holdings.

9. Russell, Tony; with Bob Pinson. Country Music Records; a Discography, 1921-1942. Nashville, TN, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum 2004. Covers similar material to Meade's book, but is organized by performer, rather than type of material, including an index to music titles as well.
worldcat holdings.