Who's counting?

This is a special edition of the Dragon Folk Club blog. Unusually it isn't the report of one of our weekly Friday sessions but something for the geeks and nerds like me.

For some time I have been recording in a database nearly all of the songs and other items performed at the club. The main aim of this exercise is to make the task of bringing together our weekly reports slightly easier. However the side-effect is that I'm getting some quite interesting data on what we do.

By the nature of its real aim, this is not particularly scientific since some performances are missing, and some are sort of extrapolated. Nevertheless, it gives a reasonable indication of what has been going on at the club since August 2018.

We have five core members of the club.Quite a few other people turn up from time to time but these guys are present more than anyone else. So, it's worth reporting the total number of different performances each of them has done. This is not a competition, just an observation.

• Colin 219
• Derek 176
• Simon 134
• Mike 110
• Geoff 86

This hides the fact that they are in two different leagues. While Colin, Simon and Geoff usually use printed words, Mike only rarely does and Derek never. The repertoires of these last two singers are really amazing and even these figures don't reflect the full size of their repertoires.

More generally we have recorded 791 different songs (although that includes some tunes, poems and monologues), represented by 804 different variants, indicating that multiple distinct variants of some songs have been performed.

If you regularly read posts on this blog you will know that I record the numbers given to songs by the Roud, Laws and Child catalogues. The Laws one is slightly more complicated but it is easy enough to list the Roud and Child numbers we have sung up to #100 in each catalogue:

• Roud: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 16, 20, 23, 31, 38, 49, 50, 51, 54, 68, 79, 87, 90, 91, 94, 98
• Child: 2, 3, 7, 10, 12, 13, 16, 21, 24, 26, 49, 54, 73, 76, 77, 78, 84, 93

That's not bad coverage. I have a record of numbers beyond 100 but I wouldn't want to bore you with them. The child catalogue has a total of 305 ballads and roud lists thousands of songs in the English language.