Folk Songs of Old Kentucky: Two Song Catchers in the Kentucky Mountains, 1914 and 1916, with Arrangements for Appalachian Dulcimer

This book provides 20 beautiful Anglo-American folk songs, field-collected by two remarkable real-life "song catchers," Josephine McGill and Loraine Wyman, in theCumberland 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 footthrough 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.