To use this search engine, enter your text in the search box and press ""earch."
This search engine allows you to search for songs in the Ballad Index based on almost any attribute, such as a particular field in the database. For example, you could search for all songs with "Robin Hood" in the title, or all songs written by "William Elderton" in the author field. Or you can search for all songs with "1815" or "Waterloo" in the historical references.
Once you have your list of songs, you can click on the link to go to its entry, or you can use the "Full Text" button to look at the text before visiting it.
There are a number of parameters. For example, you can search ALL or ANY search terms. ALL search terms is an AND search; ANY search term is an OR search. For example, if your search string is "Jesse James," and you choose to find ALL search terms, it will find about eight or nine songs, including for instance
1. Jesse James (I) [Laws E1] Roud #2240
but if you search ANY search terms, it will find perhaps ten times as many songs, including for instance
1. Jesse James (I) [Laws E1] Roud #2240
2. Bad Girl's Lament, The (St. James' Hospital; The Young Girl Cut Down in her Prime) [Laws Q26] Roud #2
3. Bally James Duff
4. Here Comes Uncle Jesse Roud #18726
If you turn on "find FULL words only," it will do just that. For instance, if you turn that off, a search for "horse" would find both "horse" and "horses" (plus "horseman" and "horsemen" and "horsey" and many other variants); if you turn it on, a search for "horse" would find "horse" but not "horses," etc.
"Enabled Wildcards" allows wildcard searches -- that is, searches which allow some variation in the exact spelling of the word. The most basic wildcard is "*" -- the universal wildcard; it matches anything. For example, a search for "h*se" will find:
house or horse or hose or hearse
Note that, for a "*" search, the "variable" part of the search can be any number of letters.
If you want to find exactly one letter, you can use "?" in your search. Here are examples:
| Search for: | h?se | h??se | h???se |
| To find: | hose | house, horse | hearse |
Below that you have a list of fields to search. If you know the name of the song, you can probably search just the title. If you don't know, you probably want to search all the fields. But if you have some other information, you might want to search a specific field. For example, if you want to search for songs by Charles Dibdin, you could search only the Author field. Or if you're looking for, say, the Battle of Shiloh, you could search the Historical References for either "Shiloh" (the name of the battle) or "1862" (the year of the battle). If you're looking for recordings by (say) Fiddlin' John Carson, you could search Recordings for "John Carson." Or if you want to search for all songs in a particular book, you can look up the book's abbreviation and search the "References" for that.
Additional notes about the search engine: This engine downloads most of the Ballad Index, in compressed form, to speed up searching. (Hence the message about download time.) If you are comfortable fiddling with your browser settings, and can induce your browser to retain the downloaded file, this can save you future downloads and bandwidth.
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The Ballad Index is copyright © 2025 by Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle.