And an excerpt from another review:

The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection. Volume 8

Journal article by Eddie Cass; Folklore, Vol. 115, 2004


The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection. Volume 8. Edited by Patrick Shuldham-Shaw, Emily B. Lyle and Katherine Campbell. Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2002 xxxix + 756 pp. 35.00 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 1-84183-0127
The publication of the Greig-Duncan folk song collection has surely been one of the most important events in the folksong world of the past three decades. The appearance of this volume brings the project to a close. The editors of this volume, however, prefer to see the publication as a beginning: "We hope and anticipate that the publication of these volumes has laid a foundation for further study and research as well as making all the song versions immediately available to singers" (p. xxi). This must be the reason for publishing any great collection of folk material. The project was initiated in the late 1960s and Patrick Shuldham-Shaw was appointed as editor in the early 1970s. Unfortunately, he died in 1977 before the first volume was published. Nevertheless, it was Shuldham-Shaw's overarching view of the collection that determined how the songs were to be divided in order to bring some satisfactory structure to the eight volumes. His name has remained as an editor for all of the volumes, while Emily Lyle has fulfilled the role of General Editor in addition to editing some of the volumes. In accordance with Shuldham-Shaw's original intention, this volume contains songs of parting, children's songs, nonsense songs, dance songs and rhymes, and a miscellaneous section.
It is not the completion of the song collection, however, that gives this particular volume its special importance, but the scholarly apparatus with which the whole series is rounded off. There are the indices to the whole collection that one would normally expect; an index of song titles and first lines, a melodic index, and an index of singers and sources. In addition, there is an index of Child and Laws songs as well as a list of Roud index numbers. But there is also a list of the place names that appear in the songs. This has been compiled by W. F. H. Nicolaisen and often the place names have some words of explanation, such as "Bridewell (Bridle, Brindle), prison in London" (p. 607). There are extensive notes on the songs in volume eight and additional notes on the songs in the earlier volumes. All of these are the working tools scholars and singers will need in order to access the collection. The editors have gone further in this volume and set out to contextualise the collection. Ian Olson has written biographical essays on both Gavin Greig and James Bruce Duncan; Katherine Campbell has provided an essay on the music of the collection; and Emily Lyle, one on the formation of the collection. This latter essay takes the reader through the collecting activities of the two scholars, year by year. It also includes an index of the places from which the two men collected, which supplements the index of place names within the songs provided by Nicolaisen. The volume finishes with brief biographical sketches on twenty-five of the people who contributed to the collection. The choice of the people who appear in this section is necessarily biased, but as Lyle explains, "It would be inappropriate to attach a value judgement to the selection of a person for this treatment ... The selection was made in the light of what information was available at the time the edition was being prepared and also with a view to giving due weight to singers who did not have the kind of achievements in other directions that earned biographical attention" (p. xxii). Whatever the reasons for the choice, it is of considerable value to know something of the people who contributed to the collection.
The development of electronic publication has transfigured the opportunities for the presentation of material such as that in the Greig-Duncan Collection. The launch in 2003 at Sheffield University of the online catalogue to the James Madison Carpenter Collection at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress and the publication on CD of the Francis James Child collection also in 2003 is evidence of this. Nevertheless, books remain essential working tools of the scholar (as Child is published on CD, a new edition of his work is in course of publication by Loomis House Press of Minnesota in five volumes). Lyle says in her introduction to the book under review, "There will, however, be many people that ...