Lists of Tunes

The Collections

All the tunes in one big list

My own collections - these are liable to change on a fairly unpredictable basis, with new tunes appearing as and when I type them up.
- There are some background remarks on this stuff here.
- the Original Collection
- Tunes from S.E. Europe and beyond
- Tunes from North-west England (this is just a reindexing of tunes that already existed in the other collections)

Other collections. Old books & manuscripts, collections that existed before I got to them. These are not liable to be added to in the same way as mine, above, and should be fairly stable.

Other contributions.
- New tunes from various contributors
- Some Medieval Tunes
The copyright notice.
If it occurs to you to put any of these tunes onto a webspace of your own, please think about the need to keep your copies up to date.

All the tunes in one big list

Listed by name
Listed by country
Listed by type
allabcs.tgz is a tar-and-gzip-packaged file containing a complete set of abc files for all the tunes on this site.
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Tunes from North-west England

I seem to have accumulated so many tunes from round here that I thought it might be worthwhile to develop a separate index of them. This is not really a separate "collection", with its own abc file, just an alternate list of pointers to these tunes picked out of their original files. I may get round to re-arranging this later.

Listed by name
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The Original Collection

"This is a collection of traditional tunes from Ireland, England, Scotland and the Northern Isles, Scandinavia, France and further afield :- jigs and reels, polskas and schottisches, waltzes, bourrees, and more", said the original blurb. Most of the 'further afield' stuff has now migrated to a file of its own, so this is the more 'mainstream' stuff (from my point of view) - tunes from the various instrumental traditions of northwest Europe. A lot of other things seem to have turned up since I wrote that description, I call this "the original" because it's what this site started from; a ragbag of the tunes that I've come across, as a player, all the various things I've just wanted to make a note of.

Listed by name
Listed by country
Listed by type
RRtunes.abc
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The Winder Collection(s)

This is a collection of manuscripts kept by the Winder family, of Dolphinhome, Wyresdale, Lancashire, originally written down by various instrument-playing family members. There are 3 separate bundles of dance-type tunes (said to date from 1789, 1823, and 1835-41) and also, I believe, a quantity of "West Gallery"-style vocal arrangements, which I've not seen and which aren't included here. Yet. Along with all this were a couple of little books, which follow the manuscripts below.

Those of you who are familiar with this site will notice a change here - this section used to be a single set of tunes, which was a selection taken from these manuscripts. More recently, I got a chance to borrow the photocopies from which they came, so it's become possible to do a more complete job. There were many more tunes than I'd seen (I think this is an interesting comment on the spread of relevant technologies - the material I saw 10 years ago was copied out by hand) - and several of those copied seemed to have been "folk-processed" somewhat away from the originals. The collections now here reflect the complete contents of the photocopies I've seen, except that a handful of pages seem to have gone missing . The first 2 have also been (independently) transcribed by John Adams' Village Music Project , as johnwinder.abc and hsjjack.abc (my ABC is written for abcm2ps, I think the VMP's is ABC2Win).

Thanks are due for all this; to the Winder family of Wyresdale for keeping the material, and to Andy Hornby, Alan Nowell, Paul Guppy of Lancaster & I don't know who else, for making the rest of us aware of it.

John Winder, 1789
- Listed by tunename
- Winder_1_JW.abc

H.S.J. Jackson, 1823
- Listed by tunename
- Winder_2_HSJJ.abc

E and J Winder, 1835-41
- Listed by tunename
- Winder_3_EJW.abc

As I said above, there seem to be some pages out of the bundle of photocopies that have gone missing somewhere - the original selection I was given contains a few tunes that are not in any of the photocopied pages that I've typed up above; so here they are. Numbering pencilled in on the back of these indicates 6 missing pages. 10 tunes, 6 pages, that'd be about right ...
- Listed by tunename
- Winder_leftovers.abc
Preston's 24 Country Dances for the Year 1801 &c.

This one also had some pages missing, there are only 10 pages (20 tunes) here.
- Listed by tunename
- Preston.abc
Goulding & D'Almaine's Twenty-four Country Dances For the Year 1826.
With proper Figures and Directions to each Dance performed at Almack's, Bath and all Public Assemblies.

London Printed by Goulding and D'Almaine, No. 20 Soho Sq. & to be had of I. Willie 7 Westmd. St Dublin
- Listed by tunename
- Goulding_and_dAlmaine.abc
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Aird's Airs - A Selection of Scotch, English, Irish, and Foreign Airs, adapted for the Fife, Violin or German Flute; printed and sold by I.A. Aird, Glasgow (?1780?)

Andy Hornby found this in the museum of the King's Own Regiment, in Lancaster. Thanks to them for their permission to put it here, and to Andy for copying it and passing it on to me. This is a big collection - 3 volumes, of around 200 tunes each - so I have packaged the 3 volumes separately.

Volume 1 was typed by Jack Campin, to whom many thanks. The abc link for this goes to his site. What you see here is derived from his version and may be superceded by subsequent proofreading on his part.

All tunes, listed by tunename

Volume I, listed by tunename
Volume I (abc)

Volume II, listed by tunename
Volume 2 (abc)

Volume III listed by tunename
Volume 3 (abc)
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William Marshall's Scottish Melodies

With many thanks to Clark Bernst, who typed them up.

This is a new section, and there is work still to be done - like, tidying up the layout. I'll get round to it. The original also included bass lines, which are not here yet. I hope to be able to include these shortly.

John of the Greeny Cheshire Way

This is the first portion of John Offord's book of the same name, a collection of many 3-time hornpipes :- transcribed by Steve Bliven and made available to the 'net by permission of Mr Offord. The book is now, sadly, out of print.

Lawrence Leadley, the Fiddler of Helperby

This is an excerpt of 10 tunes from the book, which the authors / publishers have given their permission to make public here on the 'net. They were typed up by Warren Armstrong, whose brainchild this project is; thanks to him, and to James & Matt, for making it possible. The "Web version" only shows the 10 tunes that are present; but the abc file includes "dummy" entries for all the others as well, containing all the header info, title, key, time signature, etc, but no "dots" - if you want to get those you have to buy them, I'm afraid.

Dragonfly have now sold their stock to Dave Mallinson, so you can obtain this book, along with much else, from Mally's Traditional Music Store.

Medieval tunes

A collection of a few dozen miscellaneous medieval tunes, transcribed by Andy Hornby.

Tunes from other places - south-eastern Europe and beyond

This was the 'horos and more' section of the original tunebook, but then it grew.

Ukrainian tunes

A collection of Ukrainian folk dance tunes typed up and sent by Orest Lechnowsky <olechnowsky@monarch.papillion.ne.us>

Some modern tunes, from various friends and other contributors

Contributions welcome, see the front page for details.