Posting Songs You Don't Know

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Add: Posting Songs You Don't Know
From: Susan of DT
Date: 05 Oct 00 - 09:28 PM

There are at least 800,000 other songs out there. If you know a song and like it, post it. If you see one in a book and it looks interesting, post it.

Malcolm - I promptly harvested White Fisher, but did not comment on it. Thank you.

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Add: Posting Songs You Don't Know
From: Joe Offer
Date: 05 Oct 00 - 03:06 PM

If you go to the American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress, you'll find a huge collection of sheet music, and I suppose we could transcribe all of it. As far as I can tell, there has been no attempt to cull out the bad stuff in this collection - it appears to be everything that was submitted for copyright for a given period of time. There are lots of undiscovered gems in that collection, but an awful lot of garbage.
I find that I "discover" a lot of great songs by searching for them in response to lyrics requests. I figure that fact that somebody requested it must mean that at least somebody liked the song. So that's what I use for my measure - I post songs if people request them, or if they're songs that I like myself.
-Joe Offer-

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For the sake of uniformity, and to make it easy for Digital Tradition harvesters, we ask that songs be posted in the Digital Tradition Format - title in ALLCAPS, then the songwriter name in parentheses, then skip a space, then the text of the song, and then source information and notes.

The Message title should have ADD and the title of the song, in Title Case (not ALLCAPS).

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Add: Posting Songs You Don't Know
From: MMario
Date: 05 Oct 00 - 09:22 AM

for myself, if the lyrics look interesting, or the tune "grabs" me, then I post it. I figure if it intrigues me then it probably will interest others.

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Add: Posting Songs You Don't Know
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 05 Oct 00 - 08:43 AM

I tend to agree with you.  I've posted songs I didn't know (beforehand) and even songs that I quite dislike, in answer to requests for them; when posting "unprovoked", so to speak, I stick to things I know and like or which I feel are interesting or important in some way.  A recent example would be  The White Fisher  which I came across while looking for tunes for the DT; it appears to be the only version of Child Ballad #264 ever found in tradition with a tune attached.  That posting elicited no comment from anybody, but I wasn't surprised or bothered about that, since there was really nothing that anyone could usefully add to it!  The important thing is that it's now an available resource in the Forum.

Malcolm

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Add: Posting Songs You Don't Know
From: Dale Rose
Date: 04 Oct 00 - 10:19 PM

I very rarely pay attention to any songs that I do not know. Only in response to a request do I ever post lyrics to songs unknown to me ~~ and then only if they are relatively easy to find and I see that no one else is taking up the challenge in a reasonable amount of time.

As you say, there are THOUSANDS of songs out there, many of which are of little or no interest to anyone here. Now, they MIGHT be good songs for all that, but why post if no one is going to give them a look, much less a second look? Just my thoughts.

Subject: Posting Songs You Don't Know
From: GUEST,John in Brisbane
Date: 04 Oct 00 - 10:11 PM

Here's a quick question from the Philosophy Dept from the University of Woolloomooloo! I comb throughs lots of published books searching for tunes that are missing from the Digital Tradition database. In the average book of 100 songs there might be 70 that are already completely covered by the DT, 5 for which the DT has lyrics and no music, plus a further 30 that aren't in the DT at all.

On the rare occasions that I actually know one of these 30 songs I would of course submit it, but my attitude to date has been to ignore these, preferring to be lead by other Mudcatters submitting the lyrics first, presumably because they regard them as having some merit for further circulation.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what should be harvested? There's at least another 8,000 songs out there which could be contributed!

Regards, John