Here are some of the sites in my Folk Essential category:

UCSB - English Broadside Ballad Archive (I tend to find the advanced search more useful than the simple one there)

American Memory - LOC

Duke - Historic American Sheet Music - often helpful for later songs

Johns Hopkins - Levy Sheet Music Archive - for sheet music of popular songs that were often taken up widely.

EFDSS - Take 6 mss from 6 major collectors in England

The British Library Catalogue - always worth a look if none of the obvious sites gives you anything.

And one I use less often (though Joe often puts references from it in discussions)

The Traditional Ballad Index. cites sources and earliest records of songs. (not always accurate).


I tried a few more things for Nancy but came up with nothing useful: Joyce had a song called Kitty Will You Marry Me, with first line Oh, Kitty will you marry me?, but the tune looks nothing like the RVW one (1v only: Oh, Kitty will you marry me, or Kitty I will die/Then Kitty you'll be fretting for your loving little boy/Oh Kitty can't you tell me eill you marry me at all/Or else I'll surely go to sleep inside the churchyard wall). The RVW tune reminds me a lot of The Minstrel Boy, so I had a look at broadsides using that tune, but nothing likely turned up).

There are less than 2000 entries in Roud for Nancy in first line/title, and many can probably be discounted as obviously not correct eg Here's Adieu Sweet Lovely Nancy), so it would be possible to check for likey sources there. Alternatively the phrase will you marry me occurs even less frequently and they could be checked manually.

I haven't looked at Besty since I trawled through my last list of Betsy songs without likely candidates, but I may look again.

Glad the search appears to be proving mostly fruitful anyway.

Mick