The Digital Tradition

Back in the spring of 1988, two folk music enthusiasts, each clutching a weighty notebook, met and compared (what else?) notes. Since Dennis Cook and Susan Friedman were both using home computers, the decision to pool resources was an obvious one. The Digital Tradition was born, with 400 lyrics.

After a good deal of experimentation and researching , we decided that a full-text search approach was the one to take - titles weren't a feasible way of finding songs when all one remembered was a fragment. As a result, it's a simple matter to sift through our ever-growing collection (about 9000 songs as of Spring 2002) and extract any song with, say, the name Mary in it. Or all (or any) of the Child ballads we have. Or songs by your favorite composer. Or any bawdy Scots parodies dealing with computers - yes, we even have one of those.

The next major step was to find a way to share the melodies of the songs. Since many folkies don't read music, we decided to play the tunes on the computer, synchronizing words and music - sort of like "follow the bouncing ball". We don't have tunes for all the songs yet, but we do for over half of them, and we're hoping to make a large improvement in that area for our next edition.

Back in the Jurassic age of the Internet--1992--a gentleman named Steve Putz put the Digital Tradition on a new-fangled system called the World Wide Web, at a site sponsored by Xerox. Copyright issues made Xerox nervous enough to shut the site down, and a young man named Max Spiegel, who was running a blues website called the Mudcat Café, offered to host the Digital Tradition. The rest is history. The Mudcat Café, anchored by the Digital Tradition and bolstered by the Mudcat Forum, has become one of the major folk resources in the world.

The Digital Tradition is, and probably will always be, a work in progress, adding some 600 songs a year, and improving the software. A small army of volunteers keep upgrading both the content and the technical aspects. And while DigiTrad will continue to evolve, it will always be available free of charge to anyone that wants it.


Dick Greenhaus
November 2002