The Ryan's Mammoth Collection was first published in 1882 by Elias Howe in Boston, with William Bradbury Ryan as the editor. It contains 1050 tunes, mostly in a very concise, two-line format. It uses very few ornaments, though bowing suggestions are frequent. It was very popular for several decades, and was even sold through the Sears catalog in the 1890's and later. Publication ceased around 1910, as Howe's sons got out of the music publishing business.

In 1940, Cole (New York) published a somewhat abbreviated and reorganized edition called 1000 Fiddle Tunes. It gave no credit at all to the original editor or publisher, but detailed comparisons show that it was a reprint made from the same plates. Both books have become primary sources of tunes by folk musicians in the British Isles and North America. There is a new (wire-bound!) edition, edited by Patrick Sky and published by Mel Bay, which contains a great deal of interesting history. Serious students of traditional Irish and Irish-American music will want a copy. Here is a list of online sources. If you know of others, send me email.

The Ryan/Cole books don't number the tunes, so we can't use tune numbers to reserve blocks of tunes. What I'm trying here is: Pick a single page of tunes, check with the tune list, and transcribe the tunes on that page that haven't yet been done. Cole rearranged the pages, so the pages of the two books don't have any special correspondence. But the order of tunes was mostly kept, and you'll find that overlaps are mostly either at the top or bottom of a page. If you are using my online tune entry form, your tunes will be entered immediately. If you prefer to work on your own machine, you should send me the tunes as soon as you finish a page, to minimize the chance of two people picking the same page.

Here are some thoughts and suggestions on tune entry, much of it blatantly lifted from the O'Neill's Project. There are some things in Ryan/Cole that don't quite match the current ABC standard. Maybe we can use this and similar projects to push for some new ABC features.

Please don't link to these pages from any other page on the web. We don't want search engines or the general public to see what's here until we have things reasonably well organized and stable. Bookmarking these pages is ok, of course, since nobody but you should see those links. My ABC tune finder will also eventually return the tunes here, but it may take several weeks before a new Ryan/Cole tune appears in the ABC indexes..

Here are the things we have now:

• Add a new tune to the collection.
• List the tunes from individual contributors.
• All the tunes in the collection.

 Name                    Last modified       Size  Description

 Parent Directory        08-Dec-2007 22:09      -  
 Add.html                29-Nov-2002 13:28     6k  
 Addrs/                  06-Jul-2008 00:08      -  
 CountFiles              05-Nov-2002 14:55     1k  
 Entry/                  06-Jul-2008 01:38      -  
 F/                      06-Jun-2008 14:39      -  
 Input/                  17-Mar-2008 05:36      -  
 KeyingGuide.html        09-May-2000 11:22     6k  
 Makefile                06-Jun-2008 14:36     2k  
 Sources.html            24-Apr-2000 17:02     1k  
 Tunes/                  08-Jun-2008 21:51      -  
 cgi/                    05-May-2004 00:46      -  
 fmt/                    13-Dec-2007 14:49      -  
 log/                    20-Apr-2000 11:39      -  
 new.abc                 08-Jun-2008 22:09    15k  
 new/                    08-Jun-2008 22:09      -  
 proto.abc               03-Jun-2008 21:18     1k  
 tmp/                    27-Apr-2000 14:18      -