Tam Mossman

This book sat in the pocket of the backseat of the family car for my entire childhood, and as such, it has more-or-less-defined for me what *are* the standard American singalong songs.

So I can't really be objective about it.

Its main selling point is that, for quite a slim and durable volume, it contains *lots* of verses, so if you really want to annoy your parents by singing 27 verses of "Froggy Went A-Courtin", or 32 of "Frankie and Johnnie", or even 12 of "Yankee Doodle", you can. Even for songs with a less ludicrous number, seeing all the verses instead of just the two or three that often turn up in collections is often great fun.

Of course, these are folk songs, so there's no such thing as "all" the verses, or an authoritative version. Plus, to make room for the verses, it contains no scores: there are songs in here that, as my parents didn't know them, I didn't learn a tune for until just recently, when I patched together a CD of all the songs.

They are all quite authentic traditional American songs, though some of them date back in the 'traditional' sense less than a century: I like this fact, but it also includes a few songs (such as "blue-tail fly") that are rarely anthologized today for good reason.… (mere)