A pretty fair potful, I think one could say. I have a bookcase about five feet tall and four feet wide, with four shelves. This contains collections like four books by the Lomaxes, one by Carl Sandburg, two volumes of Cecil Sharp's English Folk Songs in the Southern Appalachians, books of ballad collections and scholarly analysis by MacEdward Leach and several others, and on and on, books of sea chanteys and (genuine) cowboy songs. A thick book containing a batch of whaling songs. I also have things like The Joan Baez Song Book, The Coffeehouse Songbook, The New Song Fest, two song books by Richard Dyer-Bennet, and many, many more, including Rise Up Singing, and The Folk Singer's Word Book. Paperback collections I picked up in the 50s and early 60s. The stuff I keep in this bookcase has slopped over into others. I also have a filing cabinet full of song folios (saddle-stapled, containing anywhere from 20 to 50 songs each). This doesn't mention a four-foot stack of vinyl records and an equally high stack of CDs. I have no idea how many miles of tape (cassettes and open-reel) I have.

My cache of material is dinky compared to some I've seen. Granted, there is a lot of duplication, but that's still one helluva lot of songs!

And this is almost totally made up of British (English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh) and American folk songs and ballads. I do have Theodore Bikel's song book and a few others with songs of other countries, but not a whole lot. There is a whole galaxy of world folk music out there that I haven't even touched.

In the 55+ years I've been learning and singing songs, I've developed a pretty big repertoire. But the songs I have in my head are only a fraction of the songs I could lay hands on by going to the bookcase or the filing cabinet. And keeping my ears open, I'm always hearing new stuff—traditional stuff—that I haven't heard before.

I'm not worried about running out any time soon. . . .

Don Firth

P. S. I think we're gonna run out of breathable oxygen and drinkable water before we run out of folk music.