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The Great Song Thesaurus
Second Edition
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Out of Print
Used Copies Usually in Stock - Call for Price 770-993-8074
Also check Amazon.com - eBay - Barnes and Noble
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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
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The Great Song Thesaurus is the first place we look to find information about a
popular song. Yes, this incredible book is EXPENSIVE (used 2nd Edition copies can cost 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
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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.
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