Folk Music: The Basics gives a brief introduction to British and American folk music. Drawing upon the most recent and relevant scholarship, it will focus on comparing and contrasting the historical nature of the three aspects of understanding folk music: traditional, local performers; professional collectors; and the advent of professional performers in the twentieth century during the so-called "folk revival." The two sides of the folk tradition will be examined--both as popular and commercial expressions. Folk Music: The Basics serves as an excellent introduction to the players, the music, and the styles that make folk music an enduring and well-loved musical style. Throughout, sidebars offer studies of key folk performers, record labels, and related issues to place the general discussion in context.

This state-by-state collection of folksongs describes the history, society, culture, and events characteristic of all fifty states. Unlike all other state folksong collections, this one does not focus on songs collected in the particular states, but rather on songs concerning the life and times of the people of that state. The topics range from the major historical events, such as the Boston Tea Party, the attack on Fort Sumter, and the California Gold Rush, to regionally important events such as disasters and murders, labor problems, occupational songs, ethnic conflicts. Some of the songs will be widely recognized, such as Casey Jones, Marching Through Georgia, or Sweet Betsy from Pike. Others, less familiar, have not been reprinted since their original publication, but deserve to be studied because of what they tell about the people of these United States, their loves, labors, and losses, and their responses to events. The collection is organized by regions, starting with New England and ending with the states bordering the Pacific Ocean, and by states within each region. For each state there are from four to fifteen songs presented, with an average of 10 songs per state. For each song, a full text is reprented, followed by discussion of the song in its historical context. References to available recordings and other versions are given. Folksongs, such as those discussed here, are an important tool for historians and cultural historians because they sample experiences of the past at a different level from that of contemporary newspaper accounts and academic histories. These songs, in a sense, are history writ small. Includes: Away Down East, The Old Granite State, Connecticut, The Virginian Maid's Lament, Carry Me Back to Old Virginny, I'm Going Back to North Carolina, Shut up in Cold Creek Mine, Ain't God Good to Iowa?, Dakota Land, Dear Prairie Home, Cheyenne Boys, I'm off for California, and others.

In 1899, a fundraising program for Berea College featured a group of students from the mountains of eastern Kentucky singing traditional songs from their homes. The audience was entranced. That small en-counter at the end of the last century lies near the beginning of an unparalleled national—and international—fascination with the indigenous music of a single state. Kentucky has long figured prominently in our national sense of traditional music. Over the years, a diverse group of people—reformers, enthusiasts, the musically literate and the musically illiterate, radicals, liberals, a British gentleman and his woman companion, amateurs, local residents, and academics—have been sufficiently captivated by that music to have devoted considerable energy to harvesting it from its fertile ground, studying its various manifestations, and considering its many performers. Kentucky Folkmusic: An Annotated Bibliography is a guide to the literature of this remarkable music. More than seven hundred entries, each with an evaluative annotation, comprise the largest bibliographic resource for the folkmusic of any state or region in North America. Divided into eight sections, the bibliography covers collections and anthologies; fieldworkers and scholars; singers, musicians, and other performers; text-centered studies; studies of history, context, and style; festivals; dance; and discographies, check-lists, and other reference tools. A subject index, an author index, and an index of periodicals provide access to the materials. From early hymnals and songsters to Kentucky performers of traditional music, the bibliography is a comprehensive guide to music which has for many years been one of the major emblems of American traditional music.

“The spirit of balladry is not dead, but slowly dying. The instincts, sentiments, and feelings which it represents are indeed as immortal as romance itself, but their mode of expression, the folksong, is fighting with its back to the wall, with the odds against it in our introspective age.” This statement by Josiah Henry Combs is that of a man who grew up among the members of a singing family in one of the last strongholds of the ballad-making tradition, the Southern Highlands of the United States. Combs was born in 1886 in Hazard, Kentucky, the heart of the mountain feud area—a significant background for one who was to take a prominent part in the “ballad war” of the 1900s. Combs’s intimate knowledge of folk culture and his grasp of the scholarly literature enabled him to approach the ballad controversy with common sense as well as with some of the heat generated by the dispute. Although in the early twentieth century there was probably no more controversy about the nature of the folk and folksong than there is today, it was a different kind of controversy. Many theories of the origins of folksong current at that time, such as the alleged relationship of traditional ballads to “primitive poetry,” did not take into account contemporary evidence. Combs said, “Here as elsewhere, I go directly to the folk for much of my information, allowing the songs, language, names, customs . . . of the people to help settle the problem of ancestry. . . . In brief, a conscientious study of the lore of the folk cannot be separated from the folk itself.” Folk-Songs du Midi des États-Unis, published as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Paris in 1925, was an introduction to the study of the folksong of the Southern Appalachians, together with a selection of folksong texts collected by Combs. Folk-Songs of the Southern United States, the first publication of that work in English, is based on the French text and Combs’s English draft. To this edition is appended an annotated listing of all songs in the Josiah H. Combs Collection in the Western Kentucky Folklore Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles. The appendix also includes the texts of selected songs. The aim of this edition is to make the contents of the original volume more readily available in English and to provide an index to the Combs Collection that may be drawn upon by students of folksong. The book also offers texts of over fifty songs of British and American origin as sung in the Southern Highlands.

Includes its Report, 1896-19 .

The second woman to earn a PhD from Columbia University—and the first from south of the Mason-Dixon Line to do so—Kentucky native Katherine Jackson French broke boundaries. Her research kick-started a resurgence of Appalachian music that continues to this day, but French's collection of traditional Kentucky ballads, which should have been her crowning scholarly achievement, never saw print. Academic rivalries, gender prejudice, and broken promises set against a thirty-year feud known as the Ballad Wars denied French her place in history and left the field to northerner Olive Dame Campbell and English folklorist Cecil Sharp, setting Appalachian studies on a foundation marred by stereotypes and misconceptions. Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky's Forgotten Ballad Collector tells the story of what might have been. Drawing on never-before-seen artifacts from French's granddaughter, Elizabeth DiSavino reclaims the life and legacy of this pivotal scholar by emphasizing the ways her work shaped and could reshape our conceptions about Appalachia. In contrast to the collection published by Campbell and Sharp, French's ballads elevate the status of women, give testimony to the complexity of balladry's ethnic roots and influences, and reveal more complex local dialects. Had French published her work in 1910, stereotypes about Appalachian ignorance, misogyny, and homogeneity may have diminished long ago. Included in this book is the first-ever publication of Katherine Jackson French's English-Scottish Ballads from the Hills of Kentucky.

We were going down the road, and we came to this house. There was a little boy standing by the road just crying and crying. We stopped, and we heard the biggest racket you ever heard up in the house. “What’s the matter, son?” “Why, Maw and Paw are up there fightin’.” “Who is your Paw, son?” “Well, that’s what they are fightin’ over.” Brimming with ballads, stories, riddles, tall tales, and great good humor, My Curious and Jocular Heroes pays homage to four people who guided and inspired Loyal Jones’s own study of Appalachian culture. His sharp-eyed portraits introduce a new generation to Bascom Lunsford, the pioneer behind the “memory collections” of song and story at Columbia University and the Library of Congress; the Sorbonne-educated collector and performer Josiah H. Combs; Cratis D. Williams, the legendary father of Appalachian studies; and the folklorist and master storyteller Leonard W. Roberts. Throughout, Jones highlights the tales, songs, jokes, and other collected nuggets that define the breadth of each man’s research and repertoire.