Great Song Thesaurus
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This book is Out of Print
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By Roger Lax & Frederick Smith

774 pages     7-3/4" x 9-1/2"     Hardback
Copyright 1989
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195054083

The Great Song Thesaurus

The Great Song Thesaurus is the first place we look to find information about a popular song.  Yes, this incredible book can be EXPENSIVE (used 2nd Edition copies today vary from $10 to over $100), but we believe this book is an absolute necessity if you work with popular music or do public domain research on a regular basis. Rarely do we find any well known popular song absent from Lax & Smith's great research.

The Great Song Thesaurus is really ten Popular Music dictionaries in one volume:

  • * The Greatest Songs - Hits by year 1558 thru 1986 - 140 pages
  • * The Award Winners - Oscar, Grammy, Tony and others by year - 22 pages
  • * Themes, Trademarks, and Signatures - 8 pages
  • * Elegant Plagarisms - Titles of Popular Hits from earlier sources - 6 pages
  • * Song Titles - Virtually every popular US and British song with author, dates, and brief info - 258 pages
  • * British Song Titles - Hits by Year thru 1986 - 26 pages
  • * Lyricists and Composers - Alphabetical by last name listing of 6,163 authors - 114 pages
  • * Theatre, Film, Radio, and TV - Alphabetical by show listing of song titles - 44 pages
  • * Titles by Subject, Key Word, and Category - 44 pages
  • * Lyric Key Lines - 53 pages

This book is NOT a list of public domain songs, but a list of virtually all popular songs from the 1500's to the 1980's.  Since songs by a US author published in 1922 or earlier are in the public domain, this book includes information about hundreds of public domain songs.  If you want to know if a song is PD, "The Great Song Thesaurus" will quickly tell you when the song was popular, the composers and lyricists, and give you brief notes.  The one drawback is that Lax & Smith give the year the song was popular, not the year the song was published.  Therefore, there are songs listed which became popular after 1922 even though the song was published much earlier and is, in fact, in the public domain.  This book only gives the year a song was popular.

This book lists only popular songs.  It has very limited value for folk songs, classical music, or hymns.  But for popular song reference, we have found nothing else that even comes close.