plnelson wrote: But I don't understand why the British - with about 1/6 of the combined US+Canadian population seem to do such a better job cataloging folk than we do on my side of the pond.

Well, for starters, they still care about folk music, as most people in North America do not.

As Reinhard said, you can search the Roud Index by country. You can also search the Traditional Ballad Index by country if you download the software for iOS, PC, or Mac (though the Mac version is now very fragile). Neither the Ballad Index nor the Roud Index list country of origin -- for the good reason that we often don't know it! -- but in the case of the TBI you can perhaps look at the author, or earliest collection, and infer it from that.

That aside, I disagree with your premise. Although there are a lot of miscellaneous indices out there, the two main bibliographic indices are the Roud Index and the Traditional Ballad Index -- one managed by someone from Britain (Steve Roud) and one managed by someone from the United States (me). What's more, we cooperate, and cross-reference our entries. And both indices include both British and American books, without preference for either. We index the books that come to hand. Yes, Steve probably did more English books earlier in his process, and I did more American books, but it truly is just a case of whatever we pull out of the pile. :-) If there is a weakness in the Roud Index, it's its relative neglect of Australian material and its absolute neglect of New Zealand material, but I have entirely covered the latter. :-) So who is to say which region is "better covered"?

Moreover, and much more to the point, while there are more English-speakers in North America than in Britain, this does not mean that there should automatically be more collected songs from North America. For starters, the population imbalance was much less in the years before recordings started distorting the song pool. And the British songs are older -- British emigrants to America brought their songs with them, and they propagated over here. Very few songs went the other way, because there were very few emigrants the other way. But if emigrants brought their songs with them, then the need for new songs would be less. So they wouldn't make as many. So Canada and the United States have songs of both British and American origin, but Britain has only songs of British origin.

There are also higher barriers to collection in North America. The number of songs collected in western Canada, for instance, is quite low -- most collecting has been done in Newfoundland and the Maritimes. Why? Population density. Walk ten miles around Nova Scotia and how many people can you collect songs from? Dozens or hundreds. Walk ten miles around Saskatchewan and how many people can you collect songs from? Unless you're content to collect songs from herd animals, very possibly none at all.

Newfoundland has been collected very, very extensively -- by Peacock, Leach, Karpeles, and others; it has probably been collected more comprehensively than anywhere in the world, including England itself. The Maritimes and the Appalachians have also been well-covered. But, other than that, most of the best collecting was done in Britain. Partly it's because they're more interested, but to a significant extent it's because it's easier.

I could go on with a lot of technical notes, but I'm sure I've already produced a high level of overkill. :-)