The American Antiquarian Society and the Center for Popular Music bring you a digitized collection of American Vernacular Music Manuscripts from 1730-1910.
The first thing I recommend doing is reading the introductory text in the middle of the page. It will give you a good idea of what the site is about, what the collection contains, and how to use it.
After that I recommend keyword searching for something so that you can check out these amazing manuscripts. I chose to search for “anthem” and then clicked through the results that came up. I selected the second one in the results list and then started checking out the links under that entry.
Check this out, it’s a digitized music book that you can leaf through as if it were in front of you. Click on the right page to move forward, and the left to move backward through the book. Or use the slider at the bottom of the page to move back and forth through the book. Near that slider you can also switch to a one page, two page, or all the pages view of the book in the collection. How cool is that?
Go see these amazing historical music manuscripts today!
http://popmusic.mtsu.edu/ManuscriptMusic/
~Amanda