An Introduction to the Study of Hillbilly Music by D. K. Wilgus
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 78, No. 309, Hillbilly Issue (Jul. - Sep., 1965),pp. 195-203
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF HILLBILLY MUSIC
BY GUEST EDITOR D. K. WILGUS
ON DECEMBER 29, 1962 the serious study of American hillbilly music seemed to have become at least respectable by means of its monopolization of the entire program of the Comparative Literature[1] (Popular Literature) section of the Modern Language Association (where one of the papers in this issue of the JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE was originally presented). It should not seem necessary at this date to write an elementary introduction to a series of articles on hillbilly music, but students of the genre have apparently not communicatedw ell with their fellow scholars. One of America's greatest ballad scholars in a recent survey of twentieth-century American folksong has written:
Phonograph companies saw an opportunity, and a considerable number of untrained country singers were recorded in the middle twenties, to make discs of their familiar songs for limited commercial sale. The results were classified as "race" records and sold mainly in the South. They were not usually listed in the big national catalogues of the record companies; but among them were interesting versions of genuine traditional folk-song very characteristically sung. Some of these singers began to acquire a wider reputation and adopteda variety of aliases to evade the efforts of recording companies to monopolize their services. Thus they considerabliyn creasedth e poorp ay they got from a single company.
The "folk festivals" which were organized with increasing frequency in [the] 'thirties (and which are still in vogue) were natural outlets for such talent. Songs were exchanged and recorded at these gatherings, and reputations were made and confirmed. Small bands of singers and instrumentalists began to spring up and acquire fo llowers and imitators. Besides appearing at dances and social and political rallies, they were heard overt he radio; and more and more their records were heard. The folk-songs which they arranged and adapted and performed became "hits" of the day and were sold as sheet music and phonographic records in increasing numbers. Individual singers, Burl Ives, Peter Seeger, Josh White, Harry B elafonte, and others with great personal appeal, achieved fabulous peaks of national fame.[1]
This reads like a one-paragraph summary of the period between Homer and Pisistratus. The truths are confused by the failure to distinguish between white (hillbilly) and Negro (race) performers; between material aimed at the folk and material consciously "revived" for the intelligentsia or the urban mass audience; between the folk gathering (for example a "fiddling convention") and the "folk festivals" of the thirties, which were seldom hospitable to hillbilly performers. It may be that to the scholar of the twenty-fifth century these activities will constitute a single stream of tradition. Indeed, a mutual accommodationis already taking place. But a clear understanding of the historical process requires more careful distinctions.
The difficulty of making such distinctions inheres to some extent in our conditioned attitude toward folk music. We may have outgrown the romantic picture of a "pure" folk music emanating from the "collective soul" of the people; we may be able to accept the role of the individual folk artist; but we consider commercial and folk such antithetical concepts that anything other than domestic folk tradition seems to belong in a single non-folk category, when we are willing to consider it at all. Furthermore, for the last two centuries we have continued to treat folk music as a survival, revising our conclusions only to fit our apprehension of phenomena safely in the past. Indeed, the student of popular literature has too often been barely aware of the popular culture of his own time and of the immediate past, recognizing the relevance for folksong study of a commercial medium only when it is excessively dead.
Thus the black letter broadside began to command learned attention in the eighteenth century, responsible editing in the nineteenth century, and full scholarly respectability in the twentieth century. So with later broadside manifestations-including songsters and the many facets of commercial hillbilly music.
I must confess that my first references to hillbilly music as a "broadside tradition" were partially motivated by the need to confer, by a convenient analogy, academic respectability on the music. The analogy has proved more than convenient. The hillbilly vein has indeed functioned as a broadside tradition since 1923 in accepting material from the folk and transmitting material to the folk. But it has been as much a continuation as a parallel of older broadside phenomena. Distinctions among the "pure" folksinger, the folk minstrel, and the broadside performer may be as imprecise as their interaction in nineteenth-century American culture is difficult to document. But the fact of their interaction seems abundantly clear.
That hillbilly music is a phenomenon solely of the South in general and of the Southern Appalachians in particular is a myth in the best sense of the word. The myth has its factual aspects-that the music was first recorded in the South, that the musical style was originally Southern. But "Southern Tune," "Mountain Song," and "Dixie Music" had much the same significance in the I920's as "Old Northern Tune" had on London broadsides of the seventeenth century. Early hillbilly performers came not only from the lowland and upland South, but from the Great Plains and the Midwest-and eventually New England, Nova Scotia, and Alberta. That the first important hillbilly radio show originated in Chicago cannot be explained solely by the presence of Southern migrants. Its manifestation was of the South; its essence was of rural America. Southern hillbilly music seems but a specialized and dominant form of a widespread music; to say the least, it appealed to the tastes of the rural folk who could be reached by radio stations in Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Boston, and Cleveland.
A second myth is that hillbilly music was foisted on the American folk by metropolitan music merchants. The documented origin of the commercial hillbilly industry belies the belief, although the effect of material and performances concocted for the trade is demonstrable, and the effect of urban music is of great significance in the development of hillbilly music. But underlying the myth (which has been a convenient validation for the academic rejection of material which has nevertheless graced printed folksong collections) is a misconception of the musical culture of the Southern folk in general and of the Appalachian folk in particular. To value and to collect only the oldest songs as preserved in non-instrumental domestic tradition is one thing; to believe that the folk of the South or even of the Southern Applachians were isolated from any other tradition is another. Whatever were the prior conditions, there is much evidence that the folk of the post-Civil War South were exposed to song material from the North and West. Even the "isolation" of the Southern Highlander is a myth celebrated as much in the in-group folk jests as in the ethnographic accounts. By steam packet, by railroad, by returning loggers who had rafted timber, by returning westward migrants, by those who drove the jolt wagons to the settlements- selected musical materials reached our "contemporary ancestors." The South has been "backward," but it has not been totally isolated. Throughout the later nineteenth century the entire rural South was accepting, rejecting, absorbing, reshaping the cultural influences and artifacts of the encroaching urban civilization.
The immediate point is not the exact date when the banjo and then the guitar reached a given cove in the South. The point is that professional minstrelsy antedated the attentions of the folklorist, and the professional string band antedated the machinations of the radio and record industry. Although Cecil Sharp reported the absence of instruments among Appalachian performers in 1916, Louise Rand Bascomb had published in 1909 an account of banjo minstrels and instrumental conventions in North Carolina. [2] The Charles Oaks who signed the Richmond, Kentucky, broadside of "The Southern Railroad Wreck, Which Occurred near New Market, Tennessee, September 1904 [3] was probably the same Charlie Oaks who recorded for Vocalion Records in 1925. As a barefoot boy in eastern Kentucky, Doctor (he is a seventh son) Howard Hopkins attendeda vidly the performances of Dakota Jack's Medicine Show, which ranged from Louisville through central and eastern Kentucky. By 1920 he was himself touring with the show, before eventually joining the National Barn Dance in Chicago. In I909 Dick Burnett-blind minstrel of Monticello, Kentucky, whose performances were heard later on recordings and radio-began touring the South from Florida to Ohio, entertaining at fairs, schoolhouses, and elsewhere and selling his broadsides and songbooks.
The radio and recording industries did not invent hillbilly music. They offered new media for an already existing tradition, which they rapidly learned to exploit. They changed the existing pattern but slowly. The performers were the recognized artists, the best musicians of rural hamlets, traveling folk-oriented shows, and the developing industrial centers of the South. The executives of the entertainment media had at first neither the wish nor the ability to alter the repertoire or style of the performers. The performers themselves agree that the supervisors of recordingsessions merely asked what the artists "had," and made, at the most, hopeful selectionsof musical items to be waxed and released. The early" A & R" (Artist and Repertoire) men were indeed at times fearful that too rapid changes might be rejected by their conservative audience. For example, Buell Kazee remembers being asked not to make his performances too polished.
The recordings were at first but a reflection of the activities of the folk minstrels, to whom records were-and had to be-a welcomed side benefit. As late as 1936 Charles and Bill Monroe had to be begged to come to a Bluebird recording session; they staked their financial well being on performancet so live audiences, whose interestthey had developed previously by radio performance, often unpaid. Radio became then but another tool for the ballad-hawker to advertise his performance and his broadsides and song books. The medicines how technique was transferred to the radio show, including jokes, skits, and the hard sell. Panaceas such as Crazy Water Crystals sponsored shows practically nation-wide, and Hamlin's Wizard Oil, which had previously supported songsters, now sponsored hillbilly song folios. Indeed it was the ancient broadside tradition that called the tune for the urban music merchants, who were less than knowledgeable in this area. Bradley Kincaid recalls how in 1928 the station manager of WLS insisted that he compile a book of songs to satisfy the listeners who were clamoring for copies of his material. With the help of his wife, Kincaid produced a manuscript of texts and tunes. When he brought it to the station manager, he was told to get it printed. Finally when the sales reached almost astronomical proportions, the manager suggested that the station might well receive some of the profit. "Why, they could have had it all," comments Kincaid.
The repertoire of the folk minstrel which was transferred to the new media differed from domestic white folk tradition by its emphasis on native American ballads and lyrics. Old World ballads, both traditional and vulgar, were present, but in slighter proportion. (We must, however, allow for the aims and prejudices of the folk music collectors, from whose publications by and large we must draw our comparative material. It may be that the difference is not as great as it now appears.) The age of songs was of course no criterion, with the proviso that originally urban material generally had to be old enough to be out of current circulation-"old time" by about a decade. This was the material apparently most popular among the slowly changing rural folk, including mining, railroad, and frolic pieces, as well as songs on current topics. The new (or re-newed) songs were normally the creation of the folk minstrel, and the pattern continued in commercial hillbilly tradition. The broadside tradition, appealing to more conservative communities than did the "pop" music industry, was under less pressure for new material, particularly as it was at first introducing into the media a vast amount of traditional material. And to this day "new" traditional songs are brought into commercial tradition by country performers. But pressure did exist, especially to follow hits with similar items. The demands were met at first by artists like Andrew Jenkins and Carson J. Robison, then by promoters like John Lair who knew the tradition, and finally by professional tunesmiths like Fred Rose who learned the idiom. The distinction of a new hillbilly song from an older one is difficult and is certain only on the basis of prior documentation. Author "credits" and copyrights are of little aid. Child 200 has been copyrighted by at least three performers (A. P. Carter, T. Texas Tyler, and Warren Smith). The author credits were sometimes worth additional royalties to the performers, and some executives made a good living from the royalties from material they "collected." The artists themselves were "collectors," securing new material from non-professional sources-sometimes volunteered by listeners and sometimes sought out. The material was frequently recomposed by the collector, and we are faced with determining not only who "owns" the material, but whether the version is broadside or folk-especially since denying some of the performers "folk" status is more than questionable. Was George "Shortbuckle" Roark of Manchester, Kentucky, a folk artist when he sang for Bradley Kincaid and for Alan Lomax's Library of Congress expedition, but not when he recorded for the Victor Recording Company?
In spite of these difficulties, the broadside-folk relationship is evident in published American folksong collections. It would seem that of the items of folk music chosen for printing from relatively recent collecting in the South, one third will have analogues in hillbilly tradition-as is true of Morris, 32 per cent; Randolph, 28 per cent; Owens, 51 per cent.[4] (The percentage of items in hillbilly tradition having analogues in printed collections is, with the current state of knowledge, impossible to determine.) The nature and direction of the relationship is not always discernible. But the "Pete-Center-average" forms of "The Wreck of the Old 97" (Laws G2) are demonstrably hillbilly-influenced, [5] and one certainly suspects that variants of "Sweet Bird" which have become "Sweet Fern" [6] derive from the confused Carter Family text. Some songs, such as "The Death of Floyd Collins" (Laws G22),[7] were beyond the shadow of a doubt originally hillbilly compositions.
It would be relatively easy to pile up examples of published items demanding "hillbilly annotation," and relatively easy to castigate the academic folklorist for his long neglect of an important source even for the understanding and explanation of his items of collectanea. What is important is the indication of what can be and isbeing done in the large and complicated area of hillbilly music and its relation toAmerican folk music. The field offers rich rewards for students of various specialized interests, but even a cursory survey of the field reveals the scope and interdependence of the problems. The most significant study of hillbilly music will reach beyondt he normal domain of the folklorist, examining this section of the music business as one aspect of American popular culture, describing the development and change in style, content, economics, technology, distribution, and the like. Yet the student of American folk music cannot but find the materials and results of such study relevant and necessary for his ends, however wide or narrow they may be. The amount and variety of the material, its difficulty of access, and the number of approaches necessary for significant study at least partially account for the barely blooming studies in the field.
The documents for the study of hillbilly music are richer and more varied than those of previousb roadsides;a nd the entire traditioni s closert o us in time. Consequently, t he study poses greater challenges because of the obligation of gathering and examining the fullest range of material before reaching conclusions. But the documents are not available in usual centers of scholarly research; they are scattered and expensive, even when they can be located. Consider first the prime documents sound recordings.
Commercial hillbilly recordings issued from the "vaults" of the phonograph industry before about 1940 conservativelyn umber 50,000,n ot considering duplicate issues on subsidiary labels. Few of the records have found their way into institutional repositories, and those that have are sometimes unavailable for study. Significant listings of them with the barest of necessary information-discography-is a study in itself. [8]
Company files can sometimes yield the places and dates of recording, the release dates, the numbers pressed and shipped, the personnel, the "owner" of the material. Needless to say, vanished company ledgers render the study difficult, particularly tracing and identifying variations in matrices leased to other companies. (When a different recording by a different artist was substituted with no change in physical information on the issued copy, the problem is difficult in the extreme.) Unissued material, sometimes of significant items, is almost invariably beyond reach. Record catalogs, release sheets, and mail order catalogs are but a portion of the student's auxiliary sources. The aural documents of other hillbilly performances are few and even more scattered. Transcriptions made for radio broadcast, whether purely local or more widely distributed, are rare and valuable. "Airshots" and private recordings also exist in even smaller quantity. And many hillbilly artists were never recorded in any form.
A second important source of the musical material consists of the printed copies distributed by the minstrels themselves and by large music companies such as M. M. Cole, of Chicago. The documents range from broadsides and small pamphlets of texts produced locally by the performers to ornate song folios. The amount of this material is beyond determination. A preliminary check list includes almost 900 titles, and it is very difficult to determine the point at which some of the folios become "popular" rather than hillbilly. They not only containt extual and musical material not preserved elsewhere in hillbilly documents, but are otherwise interesting in themselves. Cherry Hill String Ticklers Ballads Number One (undated, but presumably from the early 1930's) consists of eleven leaves with mimeographed texts, crude photographs, and a wallpaper cover. Contrasting with such highly individual items are the "instant" folios of some music publishing companies, compiled by using the plates of earlier folios or by surrounding identical contents with differing covers. Some are clearly printed from performers' ballets; few are musically sophisticated. We can sometimes find intriguing examples of aural transmission or scribal error. In a composition entitled "Wicked Path of Sin," the singer-and composer-produced the lines:
Oh I can hear the joy bells ringing
Where my friends and loved ones wait. [9]
In the song book which he peddled at personal appearances we find:
Oh, I can hear the door bell ringing. [10]
But we know even less of the distribution and effects of the folio material than of the influence of commercial recordings. An immense amount of other visual documentation demands attention, scattered among institutional memorabilia, local newspapers, trade journals, and mail order catalogs. Material relating to radio stations devoting large or small time to hillbilly programing is of significance. The memorabilia of stations sponsoring the influencial barn dance programs (for example WLS, WSM, WWVA, WJJD, WRVA), of the Mexico-Texas "border stations" blanketing the nation in the I930's, of urban stations which included but a daily quarter hour of "country music" must be levied upon for even the pattern of "sponsorship" and tone of advertising have relevance. And all variety of popular media were aware of hillbilly phenomena; even when they were held in low esteem, they were newsworthy or economically profitable.
Attention must be called to more orthodox but neglected sources-the documents of nineteenth-century and later popular music. Too often a song is adjudged of hillbilly provenience when it is at the most a revision of an earlier "pop" song now forgotten in urban areas. Thus "Mid the Green Fields of Virginia" is not the Carter Family's celebration of their native home, but the creation of the Northern tunesmith Charles K. Harris, whose other productions like "After the Ball" and "Would You Care?" have continuing folk popularity. A good percentage of the lyric songs of early hillbilly tradition seem to derive from nineteenth-century sentimental parlor song-and are often considerably improved in the process. But until further study is made of songsters and sheet music, a full understanding of the hillbilly repertoire will be delayed.
Behind the material lie the humans-artists and executives-who participated in the history of hillbilly music. For studying the contributions of the executives, it is the eleventh hour; they were often older than the artists they dealt with. The two great pioneers, Ralph Peer and Frank Walker, are gone, but many others can be and have been persuaded to contribute their reminiscences. (Enterprising-and well supported-investigators might glean important documents from certain estates.) A surprising number of artists themselves can be found, whether now in big-time show business, in "respectable" business, or in rural poverty. And these are sources which the folklorist, supposedly experienced in fieldwork and interviewing techniques, should be able to deal with.
Is it any surprise not only that the study of hillbilly music has been slow in developing but that the study has been largely a matter of "private" scholarship? The inherited mystique of folklorists, the prejudices of dominant levels of American culture, and the difficulties of obtaining and dealing with the materials, have all contributed to academic ignorance. But outside the academic ranks, the intellectually curious, the emotionally stimulated, the pure "hobbyists" have been contributing more than their share, and in a more than respectable fashion. From the earlier "fan" stage of investigation have developed serious students, whom I shall not try to list, in order to avoid inadvertent omissions. Much of the earlier work belongs largely to the history of the "industry" and of the broadside tradition-sentimental biographies, fan club journals, and so forth. These are valuable documents, but the contributions have been emerging in forms as unorthodox as the subject being investigated.
Mimeographed journals of small circulation such as Disc Collector, Xeroxed discographies circulated among a small fraternity of workers, articles in "revival" journals such as Caravan and Sing Out!, taped interviews copied and passed from hand to hand, "bootlegged" reissues of old recordings, commercial recordings of "rediscovered" artists, interviews at "workshops" of folk festivals-all are being utilized by devoted students with no more academic credentials than lively interest, intelligence, a spirit of disinterested inquiry, and generosity of motivation and action. Their studies have embraced the areas neglected by academic folklorists, the performing styles of musicians, the backgrounds of professional performers, the files of the recording industry. Joined and encouraged by a number of young academic folklorists-whom I shall also refrain from listing-they are providing the foundation for a wide and deep study of hillbilly music.
The obvious need for a centralized research facility is being met by the recently established John Edwards Memorial Foundation at UCLA,[11] whose archives and activities are as vast in terms of the meagre tools of the past as they are lacking in terms of the resources necessary for the finest scholarly study. But the fact that almost all serious students of this facet of American culture are in one way or another associated with the Foundation augurs well for the future.
A few of the problems besetting the student can be illustrated by the difficulties encountered in a survey of the hillbilly analogs of a number of the ballads listed in Appendix I of the first edition (1950) of Native American Balladry by G. Malcolm Laws, Jr. Begun ambitiously in 1950, pursued continuously with the help of many others, and recently supported by a grant from UCLA, the work is still in its first stage, that of assembling the material for study. A number of insights have been made possible by the progress of the study, and some of them have been incorporated in the 1964 edition of Native American Balladry. [12] The purpose of demonstrating the importance of hillbilly tradition in the dissemination and even the origin of a considerable number of the ballads discussed by Laws has been achieved in a more or less general way, and the greatest value of the continuing work may perhaps be reflected in the study of a number of specific ballads. But further comments on the current state of the project may be helpful.
The statistics relevant to phonograph recordings that I can present have but broad value, because of the somewhat arbitrary inclusiveness of the Laws ballads and because of the somewhat arbitrary nature of some of the exclusions I have made in my research. From the ballads whose hillbilly analogues I have sought, I excluded fifteen (13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119), even though analogs of at least five of them can be found in hillbilly tradition. (I felt originally that the inclusion of these items would involve the study too deeply in Negro tradition and its relation to "race" records. I now understand that the involvement is unavoidable and that the white and Negro traditions are interdependent in both domestic and professional manifestations.) I cannot claim to have exhausted all possible sources, although there must be little not subjected to scrutiny. Since I have not been able to examine aurally all hillbilly recordings, I cannot therefore be certain there are not omissions or erroneous inclusions. But at least some idea of the extent of the project and its physical results may be communicated.
Of 172 ballads sought for on hillbilly phonograph recordings, 66 have been discovered. [13] The songs appear on 95 labels in 809 issues pressed from 448 masters (not counting separate "takes" at the same recording session). Of these 448 I have secured copies of 327. A count of the number of recording artists concerned is hardly possible because of shifting personnel and reorganization of musical groups, but more than 250 artists are involved, and they appear under 272 individual or group names. Although seventy per cent of the material is thus available, the garnering of recorded analogs of specific ballads varies widely. The single known hillbilly recording of "The Last Fierce Charge" (A17) has been secured. Of the 43 known master-versions of "Ten Thousand Miles from Home" (H2) (74 issues by 39 artists), 29 have been obtained.
On the other hand, no such summary of the research in the printed analogs can be made. Certainly less than fifty per cent of the material has been examined. The work has yielded a large number of items, and has added analogs of seven balladsl4 not represented on phonograph recordings.
A good deal of necessary and significant collection is not included in the above summaries-that involving recordings from the "pop" and race fields and that of peripheral or tangentially related items. The importance of other classes of recordings for the study of individual ballads and for determining the place of the hillbilly recording in the music industry is apparent. (Their number, however, is not great.) But the "related" items are also significant. The importance of "Twenty-One Years" (E16), reasonably clear from its appearance on 29 issues from 13 masters by 12 artists, is augmented by the popularity of "Twenty-One Years Part 2," "The Answer to Twenty-One Years," "New Answer to Twenty-One Years," "Woman's Answer to Twenty-One Years," "New Twenty-One Years," "After Twenty-One Years," "The End of Twenty-One Years," "Last of the Twenty-One Year Prisoner," "Ninety-Nine Years," and "Answer to Ninety-Nine Years" (totaling 88 issues from 23 masters). And other ballads have one or more recorded parodies or relatives worthy of attention.
The most important results of the study thus far are significant statements that can be made largely about individual ballads. That the ballads occurring in hillbilly tradition belong to Southern domestic tradition is far from surprising; there is not enough evidence in print to judge soundly the effect of the recordings on Northern tradition, although material on recently issued field recordings suggests a strong influence. The investigation has produced evidence for the "hillbilly origin" of a number of the ballads (E7, E8, E16, E18, G22), but has shown that ballads claimed by professional hillbillies, for instance "Three Girls Drowned" (G23), may be much older. Although ballads originating in hillbilly tradition may spread widely, they seem relatively stable; but hillbilly tradition does not necessarily stabilize a text. "The Wreck of the Old 97" (G1) now exists in both professional and domestic tradition in texts variously influenced by the most popular hillbilly version. Although "Ten Thousand Miles from Home" (H2) entered hillbilly tradition in highly varied forms, the Jimmie Rodgers "Waitin' for a Train" version became its vulgate canon for perpetuation by professional singers. But "Waitin' for a Train" established itself as a separate song, instead of replacing a number of other distinctive forms. The evidence of current traditional performances throughout the United States and Canada must be carefully compared with the documents of hillbilly tradition to determine hillbilly influence.
But to focus attention totally on the effect of these broadside performances on domestic tradition-that normally witnessed by the folksong collector-is to be myopic, if not to miss the point entirely. Unless we are willing to consider the professional hillbilly and his milieu as more than a mere transition or interruption in folk tradition, we shall largely ignore one of the most significant fields for the student of twentieth-century American folk music. Here are the performers for the folk, and sometimes of the folk. They are not the only folk performers, but they are generally the most successful. It is well to remember that the professional tradition has been self-perpetuating and so circular that some of the "effects" sought for by the folklorist are evidenced within the music profession itself. We can indeed study oral-aural tradition among the performers themselves, especially when the new performers are developed from the folk audience. The "good" performer in domestic tradition may likely end up in the profession, bringing with him both the strongest influence of the professional past and new life from the non-professional milieu. We can discover in the professional hillbilly tradition itself a microcosm of at least Southern, Southwestern, and Midland folk tradition-the materials, backgrounds, and experiences of the performers beckon a larger army of folklorists than we are likely to produce in another generation.
NOTES
1. Bertrand Harris Bronson, "Folk-Song in the United States," 1900-I960: Reflections from a Student's Corner," Festschrift zum 75 Geburtstag von Erich Seeman (Berlin, I964), 7.
2. JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE XX I (I909), 238.
3. JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE XXI, 70.
4. Alton C. Morris, Folksongs of Florida (Gainesville, 1950); Vance Randolph, Ozark Folksongs, 4 vols. (Columbia, Missouri 1956-60); William A. Owens, Texas Folk Songs (Austin and Dallas, 1950).
5. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, II, ed., Henry Marvin Belden and Arthur Palmer Hudson (Durham, North Carolina, I952), 512ff.
6. Brown Collection, II, 350ff.
7. G. Malcolm Laws, Jr., Native American Balladry, rev. ed. (Philadelphia, I964), 51, 223-4; D. K. Wilgus, "Folksong and Folksong Scholarship: Changing Approaches and Attitudes; IV. The Rationalistic Approach," A Good Tale and a Bonnie Tune (Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, XXXII, Dallas, I964), 229ff.
8. Some of the discographical problems are discussed by Ed Kahn, "Will Roy Hearne: Peripheral Folk Song Scholar," Western Folklore, XXIII (1964), I73f.
9. Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, Columbia 20503.
10. Bill Monroe's WSM Grand Ole Opry Song Book No. I (New York, 1947), 23.
11. A brief description of the purposes and facilities of the John Edwards Memorial Foundation is given by Eugene W. Earle, Western Folklore, XXIII (1964), III#. See also p. 287 below.
12. See especially pages 50-I, 180, I88, 207-9, 224-5.
I3. A8; AI4; AI7; Bi; B2; B3; B4; B5; B6; B7; B9; B10; B11; BI2; BI3; BI4; BI5; Bi6; BI7;
EI; E2; E3; E4; E5; E7; E8; Eio; EI; EI3; Ei4; EI5; Ei6; EI7; Ei8; EI9; E20; FI; F2; F4;
F5; F6; FII; FI4; F20; F24; Gi; G2; G3; GII; GI7; GI9; G22; G23; HI; H2; H3; H4; H6; H8;
H9; HI2; HI3; II; I2; 14; I16.
14. B8; CI; C7; Ci6; CI7; Fi6; G2I.