New Songbook for July 2008 Started. First song: (Waltzin' To Mongolia)

[Tim Roust]

Song 1: Waltzin' To Mongolia: http://songbook.spaz.org/july2008/1___waltzin_to_mongolia.php

My vision for the Freeskool Songbook Project right now is to release a different bundle of songs each month, and to format each month's collection of songs as if I was publishing an academic journal. Each month's release will be in it's own directory and will have it's own user interface and navigation system. This seems like a sensible approach, because it would create a stable, predictable way to reference the songs, while at the same time providing for enough flexibility for me to experiment with new ways of organizing things each month.

Ideally, I want this to evolve into being a collaborative project, and I am hoping to inspire others to start sending me new songs to include and other stuff. I would like this journal to become almost a monthly time-capsule of street music culture . I want to have a classified ads page each month...sort of a non-commercial version of craigslist for musicians. And I want to have articles about freeskool stuff, updates about classes forming, photos, scanned in flyers, upcoming tour announcements, stuff like that.

But first I need to start by consistently getting a new group of songs ready to be released each month. I will be living in a place with high-speed internet for the rest of the sumer. My goal for the summer was to have three seperate songbook releases finished - one for June, one for July, and one for August. My hope is to get as much work done as possible this summer so that when September comes around, people will support me in finding a new computer workspace for this project.

So I was too late to get anything together for June, and so I guess I'll just concentrate on getting something online for July. I guess my plan is to go through all of the recordings and sheet music I collected this last year in New Orleans and choose the songs that seemed to be most popular with street musicians - which tend to be the ones that are easy to learn, easy to teach, and that are easy to play in a large group.

For song #1 I chose Waltzin' To Mongolia. I also have a bunch of great fiddle/accordion songs that Nikki introduced us to, and I want to include some of the songs that people submitted to this site last winter.

I am treating each song like a record in a database. For my purposes, a complete entry will consist of a Sibelius Scorch version of the song, a PDF version, a JPG version, at least one or two MP3 recordings, and an HTML page to pull it all together. The songs I choose each month will be pretty arbitrary. My main goal is to come up with a stable way of referencing each song. The goal is to create a source-repository that is easy to navigate. The goal is to make all of the material submitted available under some sort of "creative commons liscense", so that people will be encouraged to steal each other's materials and use them as a starting point for developing their own materials. My hope is that this wil eventually lead to the creation of a communications system that allows freeskool organizers to develop classes and learning materials collaborativly.

The address for this month's songbook will be songbook.spaz.org/july2008/
There is nothing there yet except that one song. Please get in touch with me if you'd like to get involved, or if you have any ideas of songs that should be included.

[Tim Roust]

I just found a website that has information about where "Waltzin To Mongolia" came from. There is sheet music on this site that looks identical to the sheet music I copied it from (which came from Sparrow's freeskool accordion zine)
http://www.accordionlinks.com/mongolia.cfm