JC's Online Music Books

A number of historic tune collections have been transcribed to ABC notation, and most of them are mirrored at several places on the Web. Here are the collections that I have copies of:

The Athole Collection: One of the important Scottish collections, by James Stewart Robertson in 1884.
The Fraser Collection: One of the important Scottish collections, by Captain Simon Fraser, 1816.
The Nelson Music Collection: by Newton F. Tolman and K. Dep. Gilbert
Transcribed to ABC by Ralph Palmer
Northumbrian Minstrelsy: by J Collingwood Bruce & John Stokoe (1882).
The O'Neill's Project: The original O'Neill's Project transcribed all of O'Neill's 1850 into ABC. This is my copy of Dan Beimborn's original web site that housed the project. This may be the largest single ABC transcription project so far (but I'd like to hear of others).
The Playford Collection: This collection started as a backup copy of the version housed at the Ceolas archive, in the Playford.abc file.. Since then, I've collected more Playford tunes from various sources, and added a few transcriptions of my own. If there's a Playford tune that you'd like to add, send me email.
Rinnci na hEireann: This is my transcription of the tunes in the book of Irish dances published by G.Shirmer Inc in New York in 1925. This book contains instructions for 25 dances in square, circle and longways formations. It has apparently been out of print for a long time, but a friend had a copy. Some day, I may also get around to typing in the dance descriptions. Meanwhile, this is an interesting set of old versions of a lot of well-known tunes.
The Ryan/Cole collection: William Bradbury Ryan's "MAMMOTH COLLECTION of more than 1050 Rells and Jigs, Hornpipes, Clogs, Walk Arounds, Slip Jigs, Essences, Strathspeys, Highland Flings and Contra Dances with Figures" was published in Boston in 1883 by Elias Howe. In 1940, the M.M.Cole company published "1000 Fiddle Tunes", the same collection reorganized somewhat, with no credit to the original editor or publisher. More recently, Mel Bay has republished a very nice wire-bound edition of the original, edited by Patrick Sky. When I found that I had transcribed a lot of its tunes to ABC, and mentioned on a few lists that I was working on completing the job, several people joined in and contributed tunes.

The Skye Collection: Ralph Palmer transcribed this historic Scottish collection, and sent me new tunes every month or so.

All of these collections would benefit from proofreading by anyone with a printed copy. If you find errors, send me email.