| Any librarian who has worked at a reference desk knows the value of the various song indexes that have been published since 1926, when Minnie Sears published the first, and prays for more. In the 70 years since then, there has been little or no advancement in format: a list of the collections indexed comes first, with each title given a numeric or more cryptic alphanumeric key, followed by a list of song titles that refers to the collections in which each song will be found. To that extent, these two works are similar, but the amount of detail they give varies tremendously. The better indexes, like Goodfellow's SongCite, provide additional indexes to composers and lyricists, to which Goodfellow adds an index, "Musical, Motion Pictures, [and] Television Shows." To its detriment, Ferguson's Song Finder includes only an index of song titles and does not indicate composer/lyricist except to differentiate between songs with the same title. Goodfellow's title index provides first lines (often all that a patron remembers), but Ferguson does not. Including the first line of the chorus (as Havlice does) would have been a welcome addition. Ferguson lists each variant song title (no matter how close) and provides cross-references, whereas Goodfellow uses a uniform title, making his index much neater. The genesis of Sears' Song Index (and supplement) in a card file that indexes the holdings of a specific collection is the same as Ferguson's, the former maintained at the New York Public Library, the latter at the State Library of Louisiana. Both are somewhat eccentric in scope, Sears less so because of differences in publishing between the 1920s-30s and today, and the fact that NYPL has a more comprehensive collection. Ferguson indexes 621 music books from the 19th century through 1992, including select individual Broadway show and operetta scores, numerous religious collections (e.g., hymnals, "inspirational" songbooks), folk and children's songbooks, "art song" anthologies, and jazz fakebooks. Ferguson's index seems more aimless in scope, and ultimately less useful as a specifically "popular" song index. He does manage to pick up some volumes not covered in earlier song indexes by Cushing, Leigh, Brunnings, Sears, or de Charms and Breed, but there is overlap with all these books. Ferguson includes OCLC numbers for each collection (a minor godsend for Interlibrary Loan work), notes whether the indexed song is instrumental or vocal, and cites language where appropriate. Goodfellow's book, concentrating exclusively on 248 collections "published 1988 or later ... [not] indexed in any other index currently in print," functions well as a fourth supplement to Havlice's Popular Song Index, and is a welcome addition to reference collections. All levels. J. Farrington Wesleyan University |
