Folk sheet music

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.