Ron Edwards - Australian Folk Song Index 1788-2000

The 12 volume work Australian Folk Song was published in 2005. Because of the high price of this 3000 page work only a very small number of sets have been printed. In the past this would have been the end of the matter, but with the advent of the digital age all this information can now be condensed onto a disk, and this can then be sold at a fraction of the price of the printed books. This CD-ROM contains all the text matter from Australian Folk Song, but not the illustrations as we did not have the technical resources to produce all the bitmaps necessary to reproduce this work. This has meant that while there are around 800 song texts included there are only 140 tunes presented on the CD in musical notation. Sorry about that. Australian Folk Songs sets out to index the sources of all the folk songs that have appeared in print 1788-2000. The basis of this work is a full indexing of the contents of what have been designated as the 101 Prime Sources. There are 4680 entries, and each entry has notes about variations, tunes, first lines, who collected the item and where it was first printed. The CD contains the full text entries on sources for the 4680 entries that appeared in the printed edition. The text entries are the main part of the work, detailing where the first known version of any given ballad appeared in print, who collected it, and whether is was subsequently reprinted in any other book or publication. This is a read-only CD and does not contain any sound, the music that is included is only in music notation.