Genre
Folk sheet music
656 titles in the index · page 1 of 14
Folk music is the one heading in this catalogue where nearly everything is legitimately free. The tunes are old, the collectors who wrote them down are long dead, and the great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collections are all in the public domain.
The listing below covers traditional tune collections, folk song anthologies, session books and arrangements for solo instruments and voice.
W.W. Fosdick & George R. Poulton - Aura Lee
- Piano
- Guitar
- Vocal
MacNamara's Band
- Piano
- Guitar
- Vocal
The Rose Of Tralee
- Piano
- Guitar
- Vocal
Back In The Saddle Again
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
Puff The Magic Dragon
- Piano
- Choir
Ciribiribin
- Piano
Let Me Call You Sweetheart
- Piano
- Ukulele
Bad Jokes
- Piano
Hush Little Baby
- Piano
Brownie & Pete
- Piano
Guy Noir Theme
- Piano
Lake Wobegon School Hymn
- Piano
- Vocal
My Minnesota Home
- Piano
Polly-Wolly Tunafish
- Piano
Slow Days Of Summer
- Piano
The Sons Of Knute Christmas Dance And Dinner
- Piano
Tishomingo Blues
- Piano
Whoop-I-Ti-Yi-Yo
- Piano
Doctor My Eyes
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
Revive Us Again
- Piano
- Guitar
Sweet Hour of Prayer
- Piano
- Guitar
- Vocal
Jamaica Farewell
- Piano
Scarborough Fair / Canticle
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
Forarsmorgensol
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
Alt Under Himlen - Til Morgen Tøver Hav Og Luft
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
Det Var Sa Forunderligt Klart I Nat
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
Du Som Har Taendt Millioner Af Stjerner
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
Morgenens Gralys
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
Aften Nu Falder Som'rens Løv
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
Aftenrøde Over Tage
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
The Skaters (Waltz)
F*** Her Gently
Big Jet Plane
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
Just A Boy
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
And The Boys
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
Mi Caballo Blanco
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
It Never Rains In Southern California
- Piano
- Guitar
- Voice
Faded From The Winter
Jezebel
Cinder And Smoke
My Lady's House
Fever Dream
Lion's Mane
The Sea And The Rhythm
Naked As We Came
Boy With A Coin
Lovesong Of The Buzzard
Pagan Angel And A Borrowed Car
Buying guide
What to know before you buy
What you are actually paying for
Since the material is free, a paid folk edition sells on curation and usability: a sensible key for the instrument named on the cover, a clean page you can read on a music stand in a pub, chords that suit how the tune is actually played now, and a coherent selection rather than nine hundred tunes in alphabetical order.
That is a real service, and for a session player it is worth more than a free scan of a Victorian collection whose keys and harmonisations no one uses.
Tunes are not fixed texts
A printed folk tune is one person's note of one version. Sessions play variants, and a player reading the dots exactly as printed will sometimes be the only one in the room doing so. This is not a defect in the edition — it is what the tradition is — but it does mean buying three books of the same repertoire is less useful than it sounds.
For the same reason, ornamentation is usually left unwritten. Editions that do print it are teaching editions, and they are worth having if you are learning the style rather than the tune.
Instrument and key
Session repertoire sits in a small set of keys chosen to suit fiddle, whistle and pipes — D, G, A and their relative minors. Collections aimed at other instruments transpose, and a transposed book is unusable in a session. Check what the cover means: "for guitar" may mean a chord book, a fingerstyle arrangement or a transposed melody edition.
Common questions
- Is folk sheet music free?
- Almost all of it. The traditional repertoire and the great historical collections are out of copyright. What you pay for in a modern edition is selection, key, legibility and chords that reflect current practice.
- Why does the tune sound different at a session?
- Printed folk tunes record one version of something that varies. Sessions play regional and personal variants, and ornamentation is usually left off the page entirely.
- Which keys should a session book be in?
- D, G and A and their relative minors, which suit fiddle, whistle and pipes. Collections transposed for other instruments will not fit into a session.