The Green Book of Songs by Subject: The Thematic Guide to Popular Music (review)

True subject access to music has long been one of the prominent blind spots of the library profession. So much music, particularly popular music, is about something, and yet most library catalogs and reference sources treat music as an abstraction, scrupulously avoiding classification of the emotional or topical content. In our catalogs we assign to music terms that we disingenuously call subject headings, but surely this is an illusion. Does the subject heading "Songs (High voice) with piano," for example, really describe the subject or nature of the songs?

Librarians and scholars are not oblivious to this issue, but the prospect of assigning real subject classifications to musical works is so daunting that few have dared to attempt it, and most attempts have been modest. Jennifer Goodenberger's Subject Guide to Classical Instrumental Music (Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow Press, 1989) is a slim 163 pages and, despite its limitations, was very welcome simply because there was so little else available. The Web site A Song about the Moon (www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/music/ref/moon.htm, accessed 22 February 2003), a well-known bibliography prepared by Stephen Fry of the University of California at Los Angeles Music Library, lists the scant few other sources available, but most of these are both outdated and limited in scope. The sole exception is the subject of this review, Jeff Green's The Green Book of Songs by Subject.

Contrasted with its sparse competition, The Green Book of Songs by Subject would seem prodigious even if it were a fraction of its present length. The fact that it exists at all is remarkable enough. The first edition (Los Angeles: Professional Desk References, 1982) was an inch-thick, typewritten, loose-leaf volume, which, despite its humble origins, was a godsend for those librarians fortunate enough to know about it. (The fact that it was not commercially published made it almost invisible to libraries beholden to vendors and approval plans.) Green's work was the first substantial attempt to categorize popular music by subject. Before Green, such a book was one of those fantasy reference sources that librarians never really expected to see. In the intervening twenty years, The Green Book has gone through five editions, each more ambitious than the preceding. The present fifth edition is a mammoth 1,569 pages filled with tiny, precise print. Despite its imposing size, Green still describes his book as selective. He states, "The Green Book ... in no way attempts to be comprehensive ... it will never be possible to include every song on every subject" (p. xviii). Green does overstate the parameters of his work somewhat, claiming that "The Green Book covers all genres and generations of music" (p. xv). Well, not exactly. One will not find Schubert lieder or Hungarian folk songs in The Green Book, and the emphasis is clearly on American popular music.

The Green Book is quite straightforward and accessible in its approach, listing more than thirty-five thousand popular songs organized alphabetically under subject headings ranging from "advice" to "young." Green follows each subject heading with a list of boldface song titles, and under each title there is a brief discography of available recordings. Because The Green Book is aimed primarily at the broadcast industry (such as radio producers looking for songs for thematically organized programs), the information is not presented in the way that librarians might expect. The song entries do not mention the composers or lyricists, and the discographic citations give only principal artist, title, and label. Green does not provide format information, though his "Author's Notes" indicate that most of the recordings cited are compact discs. (Oddly enough, Green does cite a few 45-rpm and 78-rpm discs, and gives publisher...