An index to traditional folk songs of the world with an emphasis on English-language songs. Each entry includes the song title, first line of chorus, first line of verse, and full bibliographic information on the source. The index contains over 62,000 entries, and, to date indexes over 2,400 anthologies.

Introduction

The opportunity to develop a collaborative project between a college library and a not-for-profit, educational organization does not happen often, making the Oberlin College and Sing Out! collaboration special. The project began in 2004 when Kathy Abromeit from the Oberlin Conservatory Library called Mark Moss at Sing Out! seeking advice to start a folk song database at Oberlin. Sing Out! had started such a database years earlier and agreed to send their database as seed for a larger collaborative project that the Oberlin College Libraries would host. The records that had been entered and sent to Oberlin were from the Sing Out! Resource Center, a collection of recordings, photos, books, periodicals and other items, located at the corporate headquarters of Sing Out! in downtown Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Since that time, Oberlin Conservatory Library student employees, under the supervision of Kathy Abromeit, have been indexing folk song anthologies owned in the Oberlin Conservatory Library.

We hope that you sit back and enjoy the cultural diversity and heritage of all the traditional and contemporary folk musics listed in the index. This is where you meet the music of the people!