After the heyday of music publishing that was centred on St Paul’s Churchyard, and with the development of mass printing, the dissemination of dance music both spread across the world and channeled towards genre based operations.

With regard to the raw material that concerns this project, the dance books with included music started to be replaced by music-only collections, some of the earliest being the series by Kerr of Glasgow (about whom nothing is known), published as Kerr’s Collection of Merry Melodies for the violin (Vols. 1 to 4 starting circa 1870) and Kerr’s Caledonian Collection. See Wikipedia article.

Around the same time in America, came Ryan’s Mammoth Collection (Boston, 1883)

This was followed by O’Neill’s Dance Music of Ireland, edited by Chicago Chief of Police, Francis O’Neill and published in 1907. See Wikipedia article.

In England, country dance and country dance music publishing started to move into the hands of the antiquarians as popular culture moved on to other forms of dance, especially between the two world wars.

TO BE EXPANDED