Article MT032
logo A Discography of
Recorded Traditional Music
by Rod Stradling

To find the contact details of record labels and distributors for many of these records, go to our Useful Addresses section.

arrow.gif - 0.1 K Click here to go to a record label

Important - Please read this page first before using the discography.

The huge amount of text involved here is displayed in compact form using the Arial Narrow TrueType font - but only if you have it installed on your computer.  Arial Narrow (in Normal, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic faces) is available on the Windows 95 disc(s), from many widely available font collections, and the latest version is available here as a 335Kb Zipped download.

The green lines ad_line.gif - 0.8 K in the scrolling Index bar to the left indicate the divisions between the several files which go to make up the complete discography.

Links to Reviews are now included in this discography.

Since having published Mike Brocken's Topic Records Discography in these pages, readers have been asking for something similar for the Leader, Free Reed, Transatlantic, you-name-it, labels.  Without fully understanding why, I seem to have started work on a Complete Traditional Music Discography.  As for what 'Traditional' means, I'll just have to use my own judgement about where trad stops and revival starts, but I'd like to err on the inclusive side.

The word 'complete' is obviously a joke - such a work will never be able to be completed, given the way in which many of the larger labels habitually licence their recordings to other, smaller ones - but I hope that, in time, it will be complete enough to be a useful resource to many readers.  I do not intend to include any of the Topic material within this discography, but merely to link between the two.  As before, I will have to rely on the help of readers in both correcting erroneous entries, completing partial ones and expanding the range of this new work.

Initially, I intend to limit entries to those labels whose records are (or have been recently) available in the UK.  Should I live so long, this range may be able to be expanded at a later date, but I would prefer to be able to link to other similar Discographies in other parts of the world - as I have done with the Old-Time Music on the Radio CD database.  This obviously requires you to be on-line for it to function.

I have included a Useful Addresses section at the end.  This has addresses for both record companies and distributors of records found within the discography (where I have this information), plus a few good shops and various miscellaneous items.

Searching

If you need to search for a particular performer, song or tune, I'd suggest the two following procedures.

First, the simple one:

  1. Log on to your ISP and go to MT's Home Page.
  2. Go to the Traditional Discography (which will get you this page) and then click on several places in the Index bar at the side of the screen.  Make sure you have downloaded all the main data files, called lea_txt1, lea_txt2, lea_txt3, etc.  The green lines ad_line.gif - 0.8 K indicate the divisions between the files.  (At the moment, there are seven of these - subsequently, as it gets larger, it will be broken down into an increasing number of reasonable sized files, called lea_txt8, 9, 10 etc.).
  3. Log off, but don't turn off your browser.
  4. Click once in the main window displaying the list of records.
  5. Use the browser's Find facility to hunt for what you want.
As the Discography uses Frames, this method may not work for some browsers.  If that's the case, try this:
  1. Follow steps 1, 2 and 3 above.
  2. Go to your browser's cache (likely to be in Windows/Temporary Internet Files) and find the files you need - lea_txt1, lea_txt2, etc.
  3. Copy them into a new directory/folder.
  4. Using your browser, open the appropriate file.
  5. Use the browser's Find facility to hunt for what you want.
If that doesn't work, maybe you need to try a different browser - or load the file into a text editor and search it from there.

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