A folklore book shelf

Subject: A folkl music and folklore book shelf
From: Jon Corelis
Date: 06 Mar 12 - 10:52 AM

I thought some members of this forum might be interested in a Google Books book shelf I've been putting together, which consists of older books on folklore and folk music, the full text of which is available free from Google books.

I've decided to share it since, despite Google's famous search capabilities, these things are often tricky to find -- I keep finding new things that I missed in previous searches.

The books currently are mostly Greek, British, and Celtic (including Breton) folklore, though I may branch out into other fields. Currently the contents are sort of in a jumble, but later I make various sub-groups, each with its own shelf. Accordingly, rather than give a link to that specific bookshelf, I'm giving a link to my whole library, from which you can click on the link to the "Folk music and folklore" shelf. If I create more book shelves later for subgroups, materials of interest to mudcatters will all be on book shelves named "Folk..." something.

If there seems to be any interest in this, I may post updates about changes. My bookshelves should be publicly available; please let me know if there is any problem accessing them.

My library is here.

Jon Corelis
Songs by William Blake

Subject: RE: A folklore book shelf
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 06 Mar 12 - 11:13 AM

Try Heart of Albion - as an imprint they have an impressive stock of fine books. Especially fine is Marcia MacDermott's Explore Green Men (which explodes the myth of the Green Man as a folkloric image) and Bob Trubshaws Explore Folklore (though he loses the plot rather in his discussion of folk music, which deals with Genre Folk rather than exploring musical usage in vernaular social context as his main thesis would have suggested).

Otherwise:

Bob Pegg - Rites & Riots (and Folk, if you can find it).

David Thomson - People of the Sea

George Ewart Evans - everything

Ronald Hutton - Stations of the Sun

Steve Roud - The English Year

Bob Copper - A Song for Every Season

The Faber Book of Popular Verse

The list is endless...

Subject: RE: A folklore book shelf
From: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
Date: 06 Mar 12 - 11:15 AM

Yeah, yeah - fecking typos! But I will correct Steve Round to Steve Roud, with apology.

Subject: RE: A folklore book shelf
From: Jack Campin
Date: 07 Mar 12 - 07:48 AM

Useful idea.

Is there any way you could indicate which books have notation? - it's a bit frustrating to flip right through a 19th century book of songs before realizing there are no notated tunes in it.

Subject: RE: A folklore book shelf
From: MartinRyan
Date: 07 Mar 12 - 08:40 AM

I recently started compiling a library of folksong related books onto a Kindle for reference purposes - so will be very interested in this thread.


Regards

Subject: RE: A folklore book shelf
From: Jon Corelis
Date: 07 Mar 12 - 09:50 AM

Thanks for the followups. Some more information:

Thanks for the good suggestion about musical notations -- in fact, I had the same idea just yesterday! I've started to use the Google Bookshelf Notes feature to attach a brief description to each book, indicating the year of publication, language(s), whether musical notation is included, and, if there's room, some indication of whether the book is of specialist or general interest.

Maybe I should have emphasized in my original post that one reason I hope my Book Shelf will be useful is that it will include only Full Preview books -- i.e., those for which the entire book is available on line (as opposed to partial preview or snippet view.) The great majority of these are in the form of downloadable pdfs (and I find them a lot easier to read if I download them to a computer and use Adobe Reader -- on line page loading tends to be slow.)

It seems that apparently you can put books on multiple shelves, meaning that it should be easy to set up some sub-groups, like "Folk Music Celtic."

I'm going to try to assemble a comprehensive shelf of full preview books in these areas, but if I collect too many, I may have to start being more selective.

For the present, I'm focusing on Celtic, British, and Greek folk music. I'm not sure if I'll branch off into other types.

I may also make public a more selective Book Shelf of full preview books on Greek, Celtic, and British folklore.

I'll only occasionally report the development of these Book Shelves here, but I encourage people who are interested to check them periodically -- there will be frequent additions.

For convenience, here is the link again. It should be publicly available. If there are any problems with it, please let me know.


Jon Corelis
Songs by William Blake

Subject: RE: A folklore book shelf
From: Jack Campin
Date: 07 Mar 12 - 10:25 AM

I don't any of the items on Suibhne's list are available as free ebooks via Google in any country, so there's not much point in listing them.

Gomme's book on games might be worth adding - that's out of copyright everywhere now.

Broadwood's book on Jon's shelf is not viewable here. Does Google give you any way to tell in advance which places you can read something?

Subject: RE: A folklore book shelf
From: theleveller
Date: 07 Mar 12 - 10:34 AM

Can I suggest Heywood Sumner's The Besom Maker and other Country Folk Songs. The illustrations alone are magnificent.

The Besom Maker

Subject: RE: A folklore book shelf
From: Jon Corelis
Date: 08 Mar 12 - 09:37 AM

Since there's some interest in this, here's an update.

I've decided that for the Celtic traditions bookshelves, I'll only include books that have at least some musical scores. For the Greek shelf, I'll continue also to include text-only books.

I'm going to have to be more selective with the Celtic traditions shelves, particularly the Irish one. My searches have revealed that the nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the publication of a large number of Irish (and some other types of) songbooks, many of them apparently aimed at the "Victorian parlor piano" market and consisting mostly of material of dubious authenticity and often of embarrassing sentimentality. I doubt many people would be interested in these things today, so I'll try to limit those shelves to books the authors of which show at least minimal folkloric orientation. This will be a quick, on the run judgement, but I hope I can at least more or less keep the quality level high this way.

I hadn't realized that full preview Google books were limited by country. So far as I can tell, there's no way to determine from the book shelf list if you can access the full preview from where you are sitting; you have to try to read it. The best I can do is to put a warning at the head of each shelf that books aren't guaranteed to be full preview readable outside the US.

I'll be glad to receive suggestions for additions here or by PM, but please keep in mind the parameters of the shelves: they are for books containing words and music of Greek or Celtic-tradition folk songs, which are available via Google Books in full preview in the US. (I know that if you are not in the US you may not know if a book is available there, but go ahead and suggest it anyway and I'll check.) It may take a while for suggestions to get added.

The shelves are still in the process of being constructed and polished, so if people are interested in them, please check them occasionally in the future. I hope they will be in more or less final form in a few weeks.


Jon Corelis
Celtic suite in G major

Subject: RE: A folklore book shelf
From: Jon Corelis
Date: 08 Mar 12 - 10:33 AM

Correction to the above: "for books containing words and music of Celtic-tradition folk songs, or words even if not music of Greek folk songs, which are available via Google Books in full preview in the US."

Jon Corelis

Subject: RE: A folklore book shelf
From: GloriaJ
Date: 08 Mar 12 - 02:24 PM

I happen to be reading Paddy Tunney's The Stone Fiddle at the moment.This does include a lot of irish folklore and stories, but also the words and tunes of quite a few songs, and even the entire text of a mummers' play.I've always loved Paddy's singing, and he writes like a storyteller - " Salmon gleamed in the nets like silver scimitars.... one of their number could easily have been Bradan Easa Aodh Ruaidh or the Salmon of Assaroe itself,famed far and near for wit and wisdom,although it was only three hundred years of age."
It was published in 1979 - probably not available for download though.

Subject: RE: A folklore book shelf
From: Jon Corelis
Date: 24 Mar 12 - 07:17 PM

This project has now reached the point where it can be considered in production, though not complete: I may set up a separate web page as an entry point, but meanwhile you can access my public libraries here.
If there are any problems with seeing them, please let me know.

To recap, these book shelves list collections of various folk song traditions which are available in the U.S. (and maybe elsewhere)in full preview -- that is, you can read the whole book on line. Most of them you can also download. There are currently shelves for Breton, Cornish, Irish, Greek, Manx, Scottish and Welsh, though the Cornish one is still empty. Books on all shelves include musical scores except for the Greek, which has mostly text only.

The value of these shelves is that it's really not very easy to compile lists of such books using Google Books searches, so I hope that these shelves will save people some work.

I've closed the general Folklore shelf to public access, since it was really just a catch-all temporary storage space.

I hope people in this forum will find this useful. If you are interested, please check the shelves periodically, since I will expand them as I come across more books.

Jon Corelis
Euripides' Hippolytos: A performance version with music

Subject: RE: A folklore book shelf
From: Paul Burke
Date: 24 Mar 12 - 07:38 PM

Mr Corelis:

We thank you for your condescension.