pre-1920 popular music resources

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Comprehensive surveys:

• Wikipedia’s Music by decade and Table of years in music indexes
• JazzStandards.com — early period: traditionals and 1818-1919
• Wikipedia’s jazz standards by the year pages:  Pre-1920, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919
  

Songs of selected periods, and arranged by special categories (topical, author, performer, genre, etc.):

• Parlor Songs Academy — site index

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AUDIO

Sites with full-length audio files of early recordings:

• Internet Archive: 78 RPMs & Cylinder Recordings (archive.org)
• UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive
• Nipper’s Greatest Hits: 1901-1920
• Turtle’s Jukebox: 1911-1930

Sites with sample length audio files of early recordings:

• JazzStandards.com

Sites with Midi files and lyrics:

• Public Domain Music (Benjamin Robert Tubb — pdmusic.org) – credits, lyrics, midi — Example pages:
  • Music from 1866-1899
  • Minstrel Songs Old and New
  • The Music of Stephen Collins Foster
• Popular Songs in American History (Lesley Nelson — contemplator.com) 17th century to c. 1900; description, lyrics, midi
• Halcyon Days Music — credits, sheet covers, lyrics, midi

Midi files, no lyrics:

• Parlor Songs Academy — credits, description, sheet covers, midi

Other

individual artist recordings:

• Christmas Piano Improvisations — by Justin K. Reeve; contains recordings of 53 titles as of 3 July 2016
• Standard Issue – recordings by Patsy Monteleone

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SHEET MUSIC

sheet music index:

• pdmusic.org’s digitally archived sheet music resources index

Library of Congress Digital Collections, selected pages:

• Historic Sheet Music Collection, 1800 to 1922
• Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1820-1860
• Civil War Sheet Music Collection
• Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870-1885

other collections, A-Z:

• Classic Ragtime Piano (ragtimepiano.ca) – essays written by and sheet music compiled and organized in various categories by Ted Tjaden
• coverbrowser.com
• Duke University: Historic American Sheet Music
• Hackley Sheet Music Collection of African American Themes in the E. Azalia Hackley Collection, Digital Collections of the Detroit Public Library
• Hapa Haole Songs (squareone.org) songs about Hawaii *
• Hawaiian and hapa-haole sheet music collection, 1867-1960s (hawaiianhistory.org)
• Bella C. Landauer Collection of Aeronautical Sheet Music
• Levy Sheet Music Collection – part of Special Collections at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of The Johns Hopkins University
• Dr. Macro
  • Ziegfeld Girls 1
  • Ziegfeld Girls 2
  • Ziegfeld Follies sheet music covers, 1901-1931 + mp3 files
• Margaret Herrick Library Digital Collections
• RagPiano.com — by Bill Edwards
• Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Popular Sheet Music in the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections
• UCLA: Archive of Popular American Music
• University of Colorado Boulder Digital Sheet Music Collection
• University of Mississippi Libraries: Sheldon Harris Collection **
• Beth Slater Whitson, Songs of (bethslaterwhitson.com/bswmusic.html)
• (watermarked) A Date in Time

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Turn of the century popular music overview:

• Tim’s Phonographs and Old Records: Music That Americans Loved 100 Years Ago – by Tim Gracyk

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* hapa-haole:

From the “Etymology and usage” section of the Wikipedia page on the term Hapa:

Hapa-haole also is the name of a type of Hawaiian music in which the tune, styling, and/or subject matter is Hawaiian, but the lyrics are partly, mostly, or entirely in English.^[17] Many hapa-haole songs had their musical roots in the Western tradition, and the lyrics were in some combination of English and Hawaiian; these songs first gained popularity outside the Territory of Hawaii beginning in 1912–1915,^[18] and include titles such as “My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua” and “Sweet Leilani.”^[19]

** Sheldon Harris Collection, digitized (University of Mississippi Libraries)  — Information provided on the items in the collection may be useful, but on visits in February and March 2014 I found the digitized sheet cover images to be displayed as very small, very poor quality images. As of February 2017, there has been no change in the quality in the images displayed on this site.

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