The Cowboy Philosopher

Richard Riley Shepard's compendium is a vast, hand-indexed attempt to catalog American and related folk songs, listing titles, first lines, variants, sources, and musical notations across many volumes. Shepard claimed he had cross-indexed some 43,000 titles organized into roughly 4,000 core songs, including bibliographic references to where each version appeared. Largely compiled without computers, the work documents two centuries of song provenance and the pathways linking musical traditions, reflecting exhaustive archival research. Though never commercially published, copies of his volumes were preserved and eventually made available via archives and the Internet Archive. The collection is notable for its ambition, scholarly value, and the complicated personal history of its compiler.