Most-Recorded Tunes
The Top 100 Tunes of the Century

This list ranks the top 100 most-recorded tunes on the indexed recordings. By carefully comparing the 31,186 individual tune recordings there, I identified a total of 7,986 distinct tunes, from which this list is drawn. The tunes below are ranked in descending order of number of recordings. When tunes have the same number of recordings, tunes having the oldest recordings appear first. Note that reuses of a particular cut in later anthologies are counted, which is fair, since the popularity of a recording is a good indicator both of the popularity of the tune and of the likelihood that musicians will learn the tune from that recording.