Friday 5 March 2010

Index to Early American Songsters

Here is something useful for our Bawdy Songbook project: Robert M. Keller has compiled, and The Colonial Music Institute of Annapolis, MD has published, Early American Songsters, 1734-1820: An Index with the following description (here):

This is an index of all extant songsters published in America before 1821 and includes 35,384 songs from 621 songsters. The list was developed from Irving Lowens’s Bibliography of Songsters Printed in America before 1821 (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1976) and draws on this work for titles, locations, and other bibliographical information. Lowens defined a songster as “a collection of three or more secular poems intended to be sung.” Most of the songsters do not include music, although many contain references to the names of tunes to which the song could be sung. Many of the songsters have been microfilmed or digitized and are available through Early American Imprints Series I and II microform editions or the on-line Archive of Americana.

Contents: Indexes:
  Texts: First lines, Titles, Burdens, Refrains, Theatre Works/Venues
  Names: Performers, Authors, Composers
  Bibliography: Source data & locations, with Tables of Contents

NB: The Index (USD25) only runs on Windows XP, Vista or 7.

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