Hi, Pete - be sure to check our links page (click here), which can be accessed at the top of the forum menu or from the Mudcat Home Page. The link I find most interesting there is the Traditional Ballad Index, but there are many more resources there.
There are a number of folk-related mailing lists and newsgroups, most notably the rec.music.folk newsgroup. To avoid getting my regular e-mail filled with Spam, I use a free account at Dejanews for reading and posting messages in newsgroups. You can search and read newsgroups at Dejanews without registering, but you have to do the free registration with "My Dejanews" to be able to post messages. I've been signed up with Dejanews for about a year, and haven't found any "hitches" associated with registering.
I have a big collection of songbooks. that's really nice, but it can be tough to find a particular song when you have 200 songbooks to page through. I found out that the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (click here) has a huge collection of songbooks that encompasses most of the books I have - and they have an online index of the songs in all their books.
-Joe Offer-
-Joe Offer-