List of folk songs by Roud number
The Roud Folk Song Index gives each traditional English-language song a unique number. The List of folk songs by Roud number groups songs by these numbers, which you can find in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. Some books also print Roud numbers next to song titles, as with Child Ballad and Laws numbers. The list also links to articles about the songs, which may use different titles than the index.
Songs are shown by their Roud accession number, not by topic or popularity. Many well-known songs have low numbers, but some obscure ones have high numbers. Some tunes are part of James Hogg’s Jacobite Reliques. The index contains about 200,000 references to roughly 25,000 songs collected from English-language oral tradition worldwide. It was created by Steve Roud, a former librarian. The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) lists about 187,800 records in the Folksong database as of October 2012, including traditional-origin Broadside songs.
The purpose of the numbers is to give each song a unique identifier. The numbers were assigned in a practical way and aren’t meant to carry special meaning, but typically older and better-known songs have lower numbers. Closely related songs share the same Roud number. If a trusted source gives a song name but not the words, it is assigned Roud number 000.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:53 (CET).