This new edition has faithfully retained all seventy-seven line scores of the songs and added four new ones, Loving Hannah, Lovin' Henry, Her Mantle So Green, and The Reckless and Rambling Boy. The original headnotes and photographs tell the history of the song as well as how it became a part of the family's life. Chords are indicated for accompaniment; however, music notation and the printed word can present only a reasonable facsimile of any actual song.

This book provides 20 beautiful Anglo-American folk songs, field-collected by two remarkable real-life song catchers, Josephine McGill and Loraine Wyman, in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky in 1914 and 1916. Josephine and Loraine, the latter accompanied by Howard Brockway, a composer and arranger, were among the first persons to search for folk songs in the Southern Appalachians. the musical adventurers traveled hundreds of miles on horseback and on foot through an inaccessible world to which radios, roads and cars had not yet come. They made friends in isolated log cabins, and transcribed some 200 song treasures, some of which they published in complex arrangements in books that are now out of print and rare. This book contains a selection of the songs, presented with simplified musical notation, guitar chords, and dulcimer tablature. It also includes glowing \accounts of their mountain adventures, published by Josephine and Howard in long-forgotten publications; a must for all lovers of American folk music.

"The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home." So begins an American standard, first published as a minstrel song, that became dear to the hearts of millions and ultimately was enshrined as the Kentucky Derby's sonic centerpiece—a popular selling point for Kentucky tourism. Emily Bingham's masterful decoding of Stephen Foster's 1853 ballad reveals that the song was always about slavery and how white Americans wanted to remember it. Acknowledging her own entanglement in this legacy, Bingham takes readers on the journey of a melody, from its inception by a white northerner, to its enormous success on the blackface circuit, in recordings by Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, and on the pages of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, to its countless screen appearances, including Shirley Temple movies, The Simpsons, and Mad Men. For almost two centuries, "My Old Kentucky Home" has never been just a song—it continues to be a resonant, changing emblem of America's original sin, whose blood-drenched shadow haunts us still. My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song investigates the tune's hidden history, lodged in the nation's cultural DNA, and ends with a startling solution for what to do with this artifact of race and slavery.

Autobiography of an American folk-singer, who grew up in the Cumberland mountains. With the words and music of many songs.

The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster offers an engaging reassessment of the life, politics, and legacy of the misunderstood father of American music. Once revered the world over, Foster’s plantation songs, like “Old Folks at Home” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” fell from grace in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement due to their controversial lyrics. Foster embraced the minstrel tradition for a brief time, refining it and infusing his songs with sympathy for slaves, before abandoning the genre for respectable parlor music. The youngest child in a large family, he grew up in the shadows of a successful older brother and his president brother-in-law, James Buchanan, and walked a fine line between the family’s conservative politics and his own pro-Lincoln sentiments. Foster lived most of his life just outside of industrial, smoke-filled Pittsburgh and wrote songs set in a pastoral South—unsullied by the grime of industry but tarnished by the injustice of slavery. Rather than defining Foster by his now-controversial minstrel songs, JoAnne O’Connell reveals a prolific composer who concealed his true feelings in his lyrics and wrote in diverse styles to satisfy the changing tastes of his generation. In a trenchant reevaluation of his NewYork Bowery years, O’Connell illustrates how Foster purposely abandoned the style for which he was famous to write lighthearted songs for newly popular variety stages and music halls. In the last years of his life, Foster’s new direction in songwriting stood in the vanguard of vaudeville and musical comedy to pave the way for the future of American popular music. His stylistic flexibility in the face of evolving audience preferences not only proves his versatility as a composer but also reveals important changes in the American music and publishing industries. An intimate biography of a complex, controversial, and now neglected composer, The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster is an important story about the father of American music. This invaluable portrait of the political, economic, social, racial, and gender issues of antebellum and Civil War America will appeal to history and music lovers of all generations.

""Winner of the North Carolina Society of Historians Award Jane Hicks Gentry lived her entire life in the remote, mountainous northwest corner of North Carolina and was descended from old Appalachian families in which singing and storytelling were part of everyday life. Gentry took this tradition to heart, and her legacy includes ballads, songs, stories, and riddles. Smith provides a full biography of this vibrant woman and the tradition into which she was born, presenting seventy of Gentry's songs and fifteen of the ""Jack"" tales she learned from her grandfather. When Englishman Cecil Sharp.

(Guitar Chord Songbook). A strummer's cornucopia of 80 folk favorites! Includes lyrics and chords for: Au Clair De La Lune * Aura Lee * Banks of the Ohio * Beautiful Dreamer * Bury Me Beneath the Willow * Camptown Races * Deep River * Dixie * Frankie and Johnny * Git Along, Little Dogies * Home on the Range * Hush, Little Baby * I've Been Working on the Railroad * I've Got Peace like a River * John Henry * Lonesome Valley * Man of Constant Sorrow * Mule Skinner Blues * My Old Kentucky Home * Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen * Scarborough Fair * When the Saints Go Marching In * more.

A collection of folk songs, each with a short description of each song.

In American music, the notion of "roots" has been a powerful refrain, but just what constitutes our true musical traditions has often been a matter of debate. As Benjamin Filene reveals, a number of competing visions of America's musical past have vied fo