Historic American Sheet Music Project

The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University has recently posted The Historic American Sheet Music Project on the Web. Glorious scanned images of sheet music from their collection of more than three thousand pieces from 1850 to 1920, in full color, complete with "stains, tears, sewing thread repairs, and mending tape," but also featuring the magnificent artwork and typography that make this era of music printing so memorable. Be prepared for lengthy waits for these reproductions to appear. This is, after all, an archival project designed to document and preserve.

The home page of the Project features a randomly selected cover page from the collection and several links for accessing the collection. You can browse by decade or alphabetically listed title pages. You can dig through a timeline from 1850 to 1920 that helps place the sheet music from the collection in context. And you can search the site for references in categories ranging from title to Library of Congress Subject Headings.

The search engine, although ultimately effective, leaves a little to be desired. Initial results for a search on, say, composer (1) "Root, George" (composer of "Battle Cry of Freedom" and "Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!") appear as a simple list of the decades covered by the archive. But the list is organized by number of "hits" within a particular decade, from the largest to the "no hits" decade.(2) Be aware that the Project lists the music in its collection based on date of publication, not date of composition. Click on a decade (for instance, 1860 - 1869) and if the subject of your query has listings for that decade, the song titles will appear exclusively:

Search for root, george in <origination> with label="Composer" produced 12 hits.

Battle-cry of freedom; Rallying song
De day ob liberty's comin; Wurzel's liberty song
Glory! glory!; Little octoroon; Vacant chair
Home again returning
Just before the battle mother
Oh, on, on, the boys came marching; Prisoner free
There's music in the air
Tramp! tramp! tramp!; The prisoners hope
The vacant chair; We shall meet, but we shall miss him
The vacant chair; We shall meet, but we shall miss him; Thanksgiving, 1861
The vacant chair; We shall meet, but we shall miss him
Who'll save the left

If your subject has no listings for a particular decade, you're presented with "Search for root in <origination> with label="Composer" produced no hits," followed by a complete list of the collection's titles of that decade.

Don't miss the glossary of sheet music terms, with definitions encompassing everything from

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