Most of the good songs in the world are free to anyone—that is, if you believe like us that most of the good songs were written before 1923, when copyrights became more or less perpetual. The words to many of these songs are easily found on the internet. But have you ever wanted to hear what one of these songs sounds like? Because there is a difference between a song and a performance of that song, it is not always easy to find a public domain (i.e. freely distributable) performance of a public domain song.
Some people are working hard to fix this problem by recording public domain songs and making the recordings freely available. One is Roger McGuinn, founder of the folk-rock group The Byrds, who uses his Folk Den website to publish about one new recording a month. (We'll publicize others as we run across them.)
My son Chris and I have spent the last four years learning to play bluegrass and old-time music. Early on we decided it would be helpful for us to learn lots of songs. Lots of songs. Up to now we have probably played through close to 400 songs, learned half of those well enough to perform them, with half of those in our active repertoire (i.e. we can usually remember the words).
Another thing we decided to do early on was to record ourselves on a regular basis. Sound recordings are cruelly accurate, and the ones we've made have helped spur us on to improve our playing and singing. So we not only have an audio record of ourselves at various stages since the beginning, we have recordings (of various quality) of just about every song we've ever performed.
Recently I went back and gathered together the recordings of songs which are in the public domain, which are listed below. While they are all free, they are not particularly representative of folk music in general, being just the ones we happen to perform. In the near future Chris and I will take some time to sit down and record many of the well-known folk songs that we haven't yet recorded, and add them to this list. I will also be adding lyrics and chord changes for each song as time permits.