1900 Songs / Scanned, Indexed, Wired For Sound
Riley Shepard’s Master Book of American Folk Song is a sprawling, homemade map of American memory: ballads, work songs, spirituals, street cries, play-party fragments, campaign songs, murder ballads, shanties, jokes, laments, and border-crossing melodies. It is messy because the tradition is messy. This finder turns the archive into a listening wall, linking every entry back to the scan and pairing it with a YouTube trailhead.
This is not a polished songbook. It is a pressure map: who sang, borrowed, rewrote, forgot, stole, parodied, and carried tunes across work camps, churches, ships, kitchens, picket lines, parlors, and mountains. Open Entry jumps into the Complete Text; PDF opens the original Archive.org page; the video is the first listening lead for the title.