Song resources

There are many additional sites you can use to help you learn more about songs.  Here are a few of the ones we believe are most important:

Sing Out Corporation.  Sing Out Magazine was founded by Pete Seeger in 1950.  It grew out of an organization he founded earlier with Lee Hays, Woody Guthrie and others called People's Songs.   Sing Out is the publisher of Rise Up Singing.  

Sing Out is a not for profit (501-c-3) organization dedicated to promoting grassroots music. In addition to putting out a quarterly magazine, they have a radio show and a fine folk archive located in Bethlehm PA.  

Many of the songs in both books were originally published in Sing Out.  All songs in Sing Out are identified under the songs in our books, along with the songs that appear in the two volumes of Collected Reprints from Sing Out! (referred to in Rise Up Singing as CR1 or CR2.  You can order for a dollar a copy of any song which appears in any issue of Sing Out from their office.  

Mudcat Cafe is a blog type website that has an online database of over 9000 songs.  It includes many of the songs in these songbooks.  Blog entries often help writers locate songs they are trying to track down, lyrics, background information on songs.  The content ranges widely from composed folk to traditional Appalachian and British material, blues, and many other genres.  

The search engine on the site usually works well.  The only downside is sometimes there is much more on a song than what you're really looking for so it may be tricky to narrow down your search.

Smithsonian Folkways   Folkways Records is now owned by The Smithsonian Institution.  Many of their vast LP collection have been issued on CD. In addition for only $17, they will burn you an individual CD of any LP in their original library going back to the 1950's.  The individually created CDs even include a copy of the original liner notes!  

They have huge numbers of recordings of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, artists like Leadbelly and Cisco Huston - as well as large numbers of field recordings of traditional artists.   And they are constantly bringing out terrific new recordings.

We carry a selection of many of their Seeger recordings in the store on this site including early classic recordings such as the Almanac recordings of Talking Union and Songs of the Spanish Civil War that may require a special order from Smithsonian.

Appleseed Recordings is the premier recording company today for progressive musicians.  They have an outstanding series called "Songs of Pete Seeger".  They also have new recordings by many different fine musicians including Charlie King, Kim & Reggie Harris, Magpie, Eric Anderson, Dick Gaughan, and Sweet Honey in the Rock.

We also carry many Appleseed Recordings including quite a few that aren't listed in our store.

New Song Library archives recordings of music by progressive singer songwriters.  They also have a large collection of CDs of the artists whose songs appear in these books.