For popular songs, it's pretty easy to get basic sheet music. Go to the biggest music store in town and look for "fake books." Hal Leonard music publishing of Milwaukee has a huge assortment of fake books, and many contain up to 1200 songs (for forty bucks). You can find lots of fake books at www.amazon.com by searching under "fake."

Folk music is a different story. You gotta look harder. In 1927, the one and only Carl Sandburg came out with a classic called "American Songbag," which you can often find on remainder racks in bookstores - mine has a $4.99 price sticker on it. John A. and Alan Lomax also collected and published folk songs toward the middle of the century, and some of their books may still be available. Sing Out! Magazine has published some 20 songs in each quarterly issue since the 1950's, and you can often find bound copies of the magazine in libraries. Sing Out" also publised two volumes called "The Collected Reprints from Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine." The books each have some 300 songs, covering songs puglished in the magazine from 1959-64 and 1964-73. You can order these from Sing Out! at (610)865-5366 - or take a look at their Web site for these and other song books:

http://www.libertynet.org/~singout/

Well, that should be a good start for you.

-Joe Offer.