Joe Offer wrote: There are many ways to access the Traditional Ballad Index. I use the "Short Contents" page, http://balladindex.org/ShortContents.html, and then I use CTRL-F to find what I'm looking for. There are other, more sophisticated ways to search the Ballad Index, but this is the method that suits my needs best.

That's actually the best method if you know the title of what you're looking for. It's fastest, and the worst that can happen is that you have to look through a bunch of different songs with the same title (such as the fifteen or so songs known as "The Titanic"!). The other search methods are for the case where you don't know the title, or are trying for something different.

An example of the latter is a group of people on the LibraryThing book cataloging site, who had a small thread about songs they learned at camp. I encouraged the group, and before they ran down, they contributed 93 songs! (Of course, it helped that one user, John5918, had 43 songs, some of them quite interesting -- e.g. he had one of the few versions of "The D-Day Dodgers" to come from oral tradition, as well as a few rugby songs and parodies and music hall songs.) The only real way to find all of those is to use the "Custom Search" option and search for LibraryThingCampSongsThread. But that's for researchers, not for people who want to know the background to a particular song.