That's interesting. The tunes were working a few days ago, but now they're gone. Nope, that's not it. On second thought, I think it's just this one song, and maybe we didn't have a tune for it at all. I checked other songs, like Deep Blue Sea, and they're working fine. Most of the tunes are intact and available, but not this one. We haven't figured out an easy way to fix this, but we're working on it.

There are a number of Websites that mirror the 2002 version of our Digital Tradition Folk Song Database (our online version of the database is newer, but I don't know the date). The most reliable one is called "Yet Another Digital Tradition," http://sniff.numachi.com/. I see that "Yet Another" does not have tunes for any of our three versions of "Shortnin' Bread," so maybe it's a problem with just this one song.

If you need a MIDI or a scan of the sheet music, email me. It used to be that Q and I and Masato Sakurai and Malcolm Douglas could find tunes in our vast collections of songbooks, but I'm the only one of them left. If anybody else has a vast songbook collection and would like to volunteer to be available to transcribe tunes, let me know.

The Traditional Ballad Index lists several books that have tunes for this song. I think I have them all, and I'm certainly willing to transcribe one or two MIDIs or send scans. When we come across missing tunes, I've been doing my best to transcribe the tunes and post them to my own Website (with links on Mudcat). That's a temporary solution that we've had for the last 5 years, and I just renewed my Website for another 10 years as a supplement to Mudcat - but it's a tedious process, and I'd like to work out something better.

-Joe Offer-
joe@mudcat.org

---

Oh - I see that we have the tune in Mudcat MIDIs, and there's a link to it in the origins thread. So, I withdraw my offer to post a MIDI, because we have it already. Here's a direct link to the MIDI: http://mudcat.org/midi/midifiles/shortnin.mid