There are 114 distinct song tunes in this collection, of which 71 are duplicated in both editions. Some of the duplicates have significant differences; others are only trivially different. Many also have more than one set of lyrics, and are thus several "songs", but I haven't counted these separately. A few songs in the 1811 edition contain a second, harmony line, which may be sung or played on an instrument. These harmonies don't have their own lyrics, which sometimes causes minor problems with aligning syllables to notes.
The 1811 edition is labelled "Crosby's Caledonian Musical Repository" in the fronispiece page. Crosby isn't otherwise identified, but was presumably the editor. No attributions as all were found in the 1806 edition. Both editions are available online at National Library of Scotland. All the tunes have a URL for the online photocopy (in 2013) in the ABC header.
This directory contains all the songs, in the 1806 and 1811 subdirectories. Each song is in a single file, with the title as the file name. They have all been linked into this directory, with the year added to the file names to make it clear which edition they're from. A few songs have slightly different titles in the two editions.
I've tried to be as faithful to the book's notation as ABC and modern music software allow. In some cases, repeat signs don't match modern practice, and have been "modernized". In a few cases, it's not clear what was intended, and no modernizing was done. This may puzzle some software (and musicians), as it puzzled me. Sometimes dots and/or flags are wrong; they have usually been fixed to agree with similar bars in the song, and to make the measures the correct length. A few illegible patches were filled in by comparing with the other edition. Numbers have been added to verses, since some ABC software formats such lyrics in a way that may not make the order of the verses obvious.
| If you don't have ABC software, you might like to try a tool of mine that returns the tunes in various formats. If you click here, you'll get the page you're looking at now, but the ABC files will be expanded to show all the tunes. Each file and tune will have a line of links to return it in a number of different formats. Note that the first three files, 1806.abc and 1811.abc, contain all the tunes from the two editions, formatted for a relatively small font size. There is also an alltunes.abc file at the end that is the two editions combined. |