Goldstein Collection of American Song Broadsides was assembled over a period of ten years through active, aggressive collecting on the part of the late Kenneth Goldstein, one of the country's leading folklorists. Out of a total of approximately 65,000 items in the Center for Popular Music’s sheet music collection (in which the broadsides are included), there are only approximately 3,300 broadsides. As a result relatively few survived, and they are quite rare today. Broadsides rarely were accorded such pride of ownership. It was common practice for purchasers of sheet music to collate their collections and have them bound in handsome volumes (often with the owner’s name in gilt lettering on the cover) that lay in elegant repose on the music rack of the parlor piano. Sheet music was meant for the piano in the parlor broadsides for the pocket. Sheet music was intended to be profitable broadsides were so cheap that they sometimes functioned as promotional items for merchandisers of various sorts. Sheet music was sold in music stores broadsides in news stalls and bookstores, or at circuses, minstrel shows, medicine shows, political rallies, temperance meetings, and vaudeville performances. Where a single piece of sheet music might sell for 25-60¢ a copy, broadsides sold for a penny. Thus, whereas sheet music consumers were musically literate and possessed some degree of education and presumably some means, the audience for broadsides consisted of music-lovers who occupied a lower position on the social and economic ladder. Broadsides normally contained only lyrics, as simple text was much easier and cheaper to typeset and print than was musical notation. Song broadsides (sometimes also called song sheets, song slips, or slip ballads) were a common and inexpensive means through which popular songs and ballads were commercially disseminated throughout Northern and Western Europe, and the lands colonized by people from these areas, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
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