Till vissamlandets försvareller : eller: Att skriva visor för livet [Writing and collecting song texts. a creative practice in everyday life]

In the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, many young men and women collected song texts in notebooks, copying printed texts or texts in other persons’ notebooks. Personal songbooks, as these artefacts have been called in the scholarly literature, are documents that can tell essential things about the writers. This article takes its starting point from two personal songbooks, created and used in Southern Sweden in the middle of the 19th cen- tury. actually, one of the books contains only handwritten texts, while the other one contains both handwritten texts and so-called broadsheets. It is obvious that these books are the result of an interest in collecting texts, and this circum- stance is the basis for a discussion about collecting song texts. Often, writing and collecting song texts was done together with friends of the same age. It was a moment of social meaning, at the same time a possibility for the writer to express indirectly his or her identity, at least a facet of it. Further, it is argued that collecting song texts was a creative practice, even if the song texts were copied with all their details. But the writers selected the texts themselves and gave them new meanings in the notebook, where they were placed in other con- texts than earlier. Moreover, the writers brought the texts from a public sphere to a private domain, which also can be regarded as a kind of creative practice. In a personal songbook, a song text was under certain control, and the writer could also consider the collected text as a private property. To sum up, writing and collecting contributed to connecting the writer to the world, continuously developing his or her identity.