Songs of oral tradition in the French language
in books, reviews, manuscripts, discs, cassettes, CDs

Welcome among the popular songs of oral tradition in French collected in Brittany.

Bienvenue
Bogue d’or 1992 - Redon

This part of the site is interested in all the songs, collected in the oral tradition in Brittany, which have been published in written or audio form. It does not take into account the large corpus of songs recorded by collectors, but which have remained unpublished. For these, you can consult the Dastum website.

Created by volunteers, without subsidy, with free access for all, this site tries to facilitate the users’ research. Please bear in mind that it does not pretend to be exhaustive and must be considered perpetually as ‘work in progress’. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to contribute, you will be more than welcome!
In case of publication of information from the site, please mention the site "kan.bzh" as the source.

Do not hesitate to contact us for any additional research, remark, observation of error or opportunities of sources not mentioned here.

Enjoy your visit!

The site in numbers

We have identified 2774 song-types in French published in Brittany from the oral tradition. These standard songs have resulted in 9352 published occurrences in 276 books or sound editions. These occurrences correspond to 6763 different versions. For 636 versions, the interpreter and the place of collection are unknown. For the others, they were collected from 1136 singers, in 474 communes by 405 collectors.

Of the 9352 occurrences of songs presented on this site, 6585 are not referenced in the Coirault catalogue, that is to say 70% and 7834 occurrences are not referenced in the Laforte catalogue, that is to say 84%. Compared to the Coirault catalogue, 1980 new songs types have been identified.

The online consultation of 360 books in PDF is proposed, as well as the possibility of listening to 1861 Mp3 files from vinyls, cassettes and CDs.
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