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The Green Book of Songs by Subject: The Thematic Guide to Popular Music. .(Book Review)-

Article Excerpt
The Green Book of Songs by Subject: The Thematic Guide to Popular Music. By Jeff Green. 5th ed. Nashville: Professional Desk References, 2002. [xxi, 1,569 p. ISBN 0-939-73510-5. $79.95 (hbk.); ISBN 0-939- 73520-2. $64.96 (pbk.).] Indexes.

True subject access to music has long been one of the prominent blind spots of the library profession. So much music, particularly popular music, is about something, and yet most library catalogs and reference sources treat music as an abstraction, scrupulously avoiding classification of the emotional or topical content. In our catalogs we assign to music terms that we disingenuously call subject headings, but surely this is an illusion. Does the subject heading "Songs (High voice) with piano," for example, really describe the subject or nature of the songs?

Librarians and scholars are not oblivious to this issue, but the prospect of assigning real subject classifications to musical works is so daunting that few have dared to attempt it, and most attempts have been modest. Jennifer Goodenberger's Subject Guide to Classical Instrumental Music (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1989) is a slim 163 pages and, despite its limitations, was very welcome simply because there was so little else available. The Web site A Song about the Moon (www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/ music/ref/moon.htm, accessed 22 February 2003), a well-known bibliography prepared by Stephen Fry of the University of California at Los Angeles Music Library, lists the scant...

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