Songbooks missing half the songs

My musical knowledge and ability are fairly basic, so I appreciate arrangements and presentations of songs made with the ukulele in mind. The problem I frequently encounter is that the popular books seem to omit much of the actual song, sometimes being little more than the chorus.

Jim Beloff's Daily Ukulele and the Hal Leonard Easy Twenties Fake Book, for example, don't include the introduction and tend to jump right in at the best known sections. It's like starting Bohemian Rhapsody at the Wayne's World headbanging part: there's no balance, no build-up. Because I'm often trying to find versions of 20s and 30s tunes where the original sheet music either eludes me or has no chord indications, books like these can be the only accessible source, but what's the point of a book without the whole tune?

Luckily a great deal of the original sheet music is accessible online and does have annotations for ukulele (thank you May Singhi Breen!), but far from all. Am I the only one struggling with this? Is Tiny Tim's Tiptoe to blame?

A lot of the ukulele song sheets and song books are highly simplified from the original music. This included deleting introductions and solos and greatly simplifying the chords and notes. Usually, the published books are much better than the free online material, but the published books with hundreds of songs are more simplified than the books with just 10 or 20 songs. I think there is a "Queen for Ukulele" book available that should give you a better version of Bohemian Rhapsody.

I've never heard a more compelling argument to learn standard notation than that.

This is very common, and for many well known songs the verses are pretty much unknown. Good examples are Five Foot Two or Sweet Georgia Brown.

ripock said:

I've never heard a more compelling argument to learn standard notation than that.

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I'm working on it!

BigJackBrass said:

I'm working on it!

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But don't work too hard. You could probably learn enough notation in a minute to serve your purposes. The big trick is arrangement. For example, once you can read music, you can see that you need to play an E. Fine. However, which E should you play? On my ukulele, I have seven E's. That's the difficulty with stringed instruments.

Some music resources for older songs. Many offer complete song sheets. Others are lyric/chord arrangements. Ukester Brown's sit also has links to the music library collections at some colleges.

All of these links were good at the time of posting this.

Ukester Brown is a great source for early 20th century music. He has lyrics and with chords of his arrangements. Plus he has links to several online music libraries at universities. http://www.ukesterbrown.com/

Box offers pdf of old song music. Plus a pdf of lyrics with indicated chords. https://app.box.com/s/i5tb5k822u6tdli0zaub2sx1vb3v7f5w

Sheet Music Plus sells, sheet music: https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/

Ukulele Nick has a ton of Tin Pan Alley songs. But just lyrics with indicated chords: https://www.tin-pan-ukulalley.com/songs.html

Banjo Judy Muldawer offers a lot of old songs with lyrics/chords and often the original sheet music: http://www.banjojudy.com/songs-banjo-judy/

Vintage Uke Music has a lot of sheet music for sale: http://vintageukemusic.com/collection.htm

Music Notes is all sheet music for sale: https://www.musicnotes.com/

pdf-minstrel has quite a lot of standard notation/tab music of various genres. Music only not lyrics: https://pdfminstrel.wordpress.com/

Uke Fever offers a lot of music from various genres. Intros/Bridges only for a few. Just the standard notation/tabs, no lyrics. https://sites.google.com/site/tabs4ukes/home-1

Thanks for the links and suggestions.