Song Hunting: Popular Songs

People usually search for popular songs by title, but that may not work in our online catalog because songs in collections do not always have title entries in library catalogs.  Instead only titles of whole collections may be listed.  Individual song titles may be listed as contents notes, or they may not be listed at all. 

Start your song hunt with a title search and/or keyword search in the online catalog.  You can limit your search to scores.  (If you need to learn more about how to use the catalog, please visit our Music Library Searching Tutorial.)  If you don't get results by searching, one thing you can try is browsing some of the collections on our regular shelves.  Many of them have M1627 and M1630.18 call numbers.     

Because many collections focus on eras, knowing the date or approximate date a song was written, or knowing when it was especially popular, will often help you to find it.  If you don't know, here is a good place to look for this information:

The Great Song Thesaurus, 2d ed., ed. by Roger Lax and Frederick Smith.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1989.

WILLIS 4FL MUSIC RERERENCE:
ML128.S3 L4 1989

This very useful source cites popular songs and lists their composers, lyricists, and dates.  If songs were popular at various times or were featured in certain movies or shows, the authors will usually tell you.  There are lists of top hits by year at the beginning of the book.    

Examples of what you may already know about your song and what it tells us: 

• It's a famous old standard from Tin Pan Alley.  This would likely place it from ca. 1890 to ca. 1920.   
• It's a big band standard.  This would probably place it in the 1930s or 1940s. 
• It's an early rock and roll hit.  This would place it in the early to mid 1950s.
• It's something a star of today just wrote for his new album last year.  Our older resources won't help you.  Do an author search in the online catalog to see if we have a songbook by this artist.

Examples of collections we have which focus on eras or years:

• Great Songs of the Sixties
• The Best of 1957
• The Big Bands Songbook
• Songs of the 30's
• Top Hits of 2000
• American Rock & Roll: the big hits of the late 50's and early 60's

Sometimes knowing the composer will help, especially if the composer is particularly famous.

Example of collections devoted to famous composers:

• Duke Ellington, American Composer
• The Johnny Mercer songbook 

There are many successful and prolific popular composers, however, whose names are largely unknown.  There are even "one-hit wonders" who wrote only one very famous song.  There may not be any collections devoted solely to their works. 

Many collections focus on styles, so knowing the style, not just the era, may be critical.

Examples:

• The New 50 Golden Jazz Classics
• The rock & roll guitar big book
• All American Country

A SPECIAL POPULAR SONG RESOURCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS MUSIC LIBRARY:

The WFAA and WBAP Collections, mainly consisting of SONGS in various arrangements:

These collections of more than 400,000 items include sheet music, published orchestrations, and original arrangements used by the studio orchestras of WFAA and WBAP, the oldest radio stations in Dallas and Fort Worth.  Both collections are searchable online.  The WBAP Collection is searchable in the Music Special Collections Catalog; the WFAA collection is searchable in the regular online catalog.  Both provide access by composer, lyricist, arranger, song title, and motion picture or musical theatre title. 

The Music Special Collections Catalog also includes entries for UNT's so-called Song Collection, which consists of piano-vocal sheet music for mostly older popular songs, and an index of songs published in the periodicals Sheet Music Magazine and Piano Today. 

If you need to see works from our special collections, please ask at the music service desk during business hours Monday-Friday.  A full-time staff member will be glad to pull them for you.  These materials may not be checked out of the library.  

Whether it is new or old, a song may be in our vast collection of fake books, all of which are on reserve.   There are several ways to search them.  Do a title search or keyword search in our online catalog.  The catalog now has contents notes for all the songs in our fake books.  Also, there is an index to fake books in our reference collection: 

Goodfellow, William D., 1947-    Where's that tune? : an index to songs in fakebooks.  Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press, 1990.

WILLIS 4FL MUSIC REF
ML128.P63 G66 1990

Of course this book is not limited to fake books in our collection.  This might help if you or someone you know owns some that the library doesn't have.

NOTE 1:  Most fake books only include tunes, symbols for chord changes, and lyrics.  Many jazz and pop performers who improvise prefer these to more complete scores.  Would a copy in a fake book be suitable for your purposes? 

NOTE 2:  The library DOES NOT collect illegal fake books!

A special note about songs from Broadway shows:  To search for those, please follow advice in the separate section for hunting arias.