Title of the Website: The Mudcat Café: a magazine dedicated to blues and folk music.

Reviewed by Linda Robbins

The Mudcat Café, URL: http://www.mudcat.org

The Mudcat Café is an unlikely title for a

well-organized and well-thought out website dedicated to

blues and folk music in a magazine or newspaper format.

The website relates beautifully to Storytelling because

the 8,000 songs in the database are a lyrical treasure

trove for storytellers to use with their research and

music. The layout of the opening window looks informal

and loose, but belies the fact that every tidbit is

worded in a concise manner with hot links that provide

valuable information for professional musicians and

storytellers as well as amateurs.

The authors of this website are 70+ volunteers in the

field of blues, folk music, and storytelling. Max D.

Spiegel is the publisher of The Mudcat Café. The leader

of the effort is Dick Greenhaus, 28 Powell Street,

Greenwich, CT 06831, 203.531.7314. Email:

digitrad@world.std.com. 

The most current date is today’s date in the Foam

(discussion page with more than 100 postings categorized

according to date, time, posting title, and number of

postings about a specific title. The opening window date

is December 16, 2001, which may not appear as current as

it could be, except for the fact that the FAC page

indicates that the website is updated every six months

with 300 additional songs. The Digital Tradition Folk

Song Server is a database containing the words and music

to thousands of folk songs. The songs have been

collected over the last eleven years. It was originally

distributed as a free PC DOS program with full text

search and audio playback. The Digital Tradition is now

available also as plain ASCII text (for UNIX systems),

WWW Internet server, and CD-ROM format. To receive the

original PC version Digital Tradition send five

formatted HD disks or $5.00 for the CD-ROM. The

Philadelphia Folksong Society has given generous grants

to The Mudcat Café to upgrade their computer equipment

to keep up with the demands of the increasing size of

the Digital Tradition. 

The reasons that 8,000 folk songs are so easy to search

by title, author where available, and keyword, or topic

is because of the very fast and powerful full-text

search program askSam system from Perry, Florida and

Songwright of Leesburg, Virginia, a play only

music-processing program. These programs have been

offered for use by The Mudcat Café at no charge to them

or their users.  If one purchases PlayWright, they may

print out the tunes to over 4,000 of the songs in any

key and play them through a MIDI interface on a variety

of electronic instruments.

Features and hot links include Search or Browse the

digital tradition folksong, database, The Spring 1999

Digital Tradition Folksong Database (downloadable DOS

format), Mudcat Blues Museum, Mudcat Radio (Live and

Archives with RealAudio), Links System (add your own

links), Bookmarks (Personal Page), The Mudcat Record

Shop, Forum, The Mudcat Café for Kids, Welcome contest

contributors.

Over 500 links with short annotations and genera

category have been compiled by the volunteers and

contributors that include Storytelling and Poetry, and

Folk Festivals. With this many links, I found some were

not current, but most were. The Mudcat Café for Kids

includes directions for making many folk instruments

with materials found at home. 

I highly recommend this website to anyone in

Storytelling who is looking for complete lyrics to

folksongs. Where possible, the website attributes

appropriate copyright information about each song,

images, content, and music. All photos, music, images,

etc. are copyrighted by their rightful owners. The

website honestly states that they are not a copyright

resource.