The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #2868   Message #67798
Posted By: Joe Offer
03-Apr-99 - 04:43 AM
Thread Name: songbook bibliography
Subject: RE: songbook bibliography
I guess most of my favorites got listed - Doerflinger, the five Lomax books, Sandburg's American Songbag, Folksinger's Word Book, Jerry Silverman's Folk Song Encyclopedia (still in print), Sam Henry, Warner's Traditional American Folk Songs. Oh, here's one that didn't make the list: Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People,, by Lomax, Guthrie, and Seeger (Oak Publications, 1967) - lots of the activist songs from the first half of this century.

If you have a lot of songbooks, finding a particular song can be a problem. I started making a database of all the songs in all my songbooks, but the job got very tedious, very fast. Then I discovered the UTK Song Index, the index of the vast songbook collection of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I found out UTK had already indexed most of the songbooks in my collection. To expand that collection, I use http://www.bookfinder.com/, which searches several Internet used book stores.
-Joe Offer-