An interesting find in the world of taxonomies today, Platter-saurus – a thesaurus of 20th century musical styles, artists, and titles. This thesaurus is available in a printed book format (limited quantities available) and CD-ROM, as well as online. The advantage of the book and CD-ROM is that you can explore musical categories and find artists and song titles you may not have heard of before or perhaps have forgotten.
However, the advantage of the website is that you can look up an inquiry and immediately research certain topics or find all the songs by a given artist or all the artists who have recorded any given song. The website contains a search engine and over 125,000 entries.
Take a look and you could learn things such as that the eight reindeer named in the song “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” were originally named Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder (aka Dunder, Donner) & Blixem (aka Bliksem, Blitzen) in the poem it was based on. In later versions of the poem those names became Donner & Blitzen, the names used in Gene Autry’s vocal rendition.
Melody K. Smith
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