I wanted to headline this "Shameless Self-Promotion," but titles aren't allowed to be that long. :-( Sorry about that.

Anyway, Ballad Index 6.6 is out. This is the first one to have been installed from the start at our new home:

http://balladindex.org/

With luck, this may even mean that some of the messy old files have been cleaned up.

If you want to go straight to the Table of Contents, the full contents (with song descriptions) is here:
http://balladindex.org/Contents.html

The short contents, without descriptions, is here:
http://balladindex.org/ShortContents.html

Or you can go to the search page here:
http://balladindex.org/BalladSearch.html

The search engines won't be updated for the new content yet, and neither the Google nor the DuckDuckGo search is all that good. If you try one and it doesn't find what you want, try the other. Sometimes they complement. But it's often easier to try the title you know in the Table of Contents and see where that leads you.

For the rest, here is the relevant part of the What's New file

The Roud Index

This edition coordinates with Roud Index release 124 (release 124 is the version included in the Ballad Index software), although a few items have been updated to release 125.

Materials Added in this Edition
The following books were fully indexed in Version 6.6:

* Max Arthur (with an Introduction by Lyn MacDonald), When This Bloody War Is Over: Solders' Songs of the First World War
* Thomas E. Cheney, editor, Mormon Songs from the Rocky Mountains
* Austin and Alta Fife, Saints of Sage and Saddle: Folklore Among the Mormons
* Robert Ford, Song Histories
* John Greenway, Folklore of the Great West
* Richard E. Lingenfelter and Richard A. Dwyer, editors, with David Cohen, music editor, Songs of the American West
* Maggi Kerr Peirce, Keep the Kettle Boiling: Rhymes from a Belfast Childhood
* Leo Rainey, Orilla Pinkston, Olaf Pinkston, Songs of the Ozark Folk
* Carl Withers, Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Mo and Other Counting Out Rhymes (originally published as Counting Out)

The following books were partially indexed in Version 6.6:

* Frank Sidgwick, Editor, Ballads and Poems Illustrating English History
* (no author listed; most published by Irwin P. Beadle and Co), [Beadle's] Dime Song Book (#1-#20 -- the numbered songbooks)

This brings the total number of books indexed fully or partially to 478 (366 of them indexed in their entirety), with hundreds more cited in ADDITIONAL entries or the SAME TUNE field.

We now have 17133 different songs (399 more than in the last edition, which had 16734), under 31069 titles. At least 1475 songs were added or had their entries updated in version 6.6.

The Supplemental Tradition now contains full or partial texts for 1136 songs.

There are 550 songs for which the NOTES exceed 500 words;
388 with at least 1000 words of notes;
55 with at least 5000 words of notes.

836 songs have enough data in the notes to call for a bibliography of at least three items.

Fun statistics:

The five most popular songs:
1. Bonny Barbara Allan (174 references)
2. The Golden Vanity (137 references)
3. The Gypsy Laddie (134 references)
4. Lord Thomas and Fair Annet (115 references)
5. The Daemon Lover/The House Carpenter (113 references)

(The most popular non-Child Ballad? Frog Went A-Courting, with 109 references; it's #7. Next below it are John Henry [Laws I1], with 90, and Pretty Fair Maid (The Maiden in the Garden; The Broken Token) [Laws N42], also with 90 references; they're #15/#16.)

8172 songs -- somewhat less than half the song in the database -- have only one reference (or, in a few cases, none), meaning that 8961 have at least two.

13491 songs are listed as having unknown authors, meaning that 3642 songs have an author listed (not always with certainty).

16362 songs have at least one book reference
3735 songs have at least one recording reference
1462 songs have at least one reference to a broadside in a major collection (Bodleian, etc.)
188 songs have at least one manuscript reference

7211 songs have been found somewhere in the United States
4228 songs have been found in Britain
2315 have been found in Ireland (including Northern Ireland)
2062 have been found in Canada
421 have been found in Australia
354 have been found somewhere in the West Indies
265 have been found in New Zealand


New substantial articles in this edition include:

* The Athol Gathering (Lord George Murray may have been gallant, but he was also a jerk....)
* Billy Hughes's Army (Recruiting troops in World War I is tough no matter who you are)
* Bread and Roses (the making of a labor anthem -- and the false story usually associated with it)
* The Devil and Bailiff McGlynn (in which the Devil comes to take a cursed soul, but the curse must be "from the heart")
* The Hunting of the Cheviot (Somebody survived the Battle of Otterburn. Who was it?)
* The Keeper of the Eddystone Light (Which was more unlikely, the light, or the keeper's exploits?)
* The Knight of Liddesdale [Child 160] (We don't know what they sang about him, but we sure know that he fought a lot!)
* Mighty Mississippi (The story of the 1927 Mississippi flood)
* The Monmouth Rebel (The death of Charles II brings a rebellion, the judicial murder of a harmless old woman, and a whole lot of fear)
* Mormon Battalion Song (in which the Mormon Battalion marches a great distance and... doesn't fight anyone)
* The Old Virginia Low Lands Low (who was Josey Hooker fighting, anyway?)
* Trelawny (You can't keep a good Bishop down, at least when you're a Catholic king in an Anglican country)
* Victoria's Southern Cross (the government had all the might in the contest over workers' rights at the Eureka Stockade, but it sure could have used a better poet)