Folk-Songs of the Southern United States

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Foreword
Preface
Part II. Topography of the Southern Highlands
II. Ancestry of the Highlanders
III. The Question of Origin or Authorship
IV. The Quest of the Folk-Song
V. An Attempt at Classification of Folk-Songs
VI. Songs of British Origin
VII. Native American Songs
VIII. The Highlander's Music
IX. The Passing of the Folk-Song
Bibliography
Part IISongs of British Origin
1. The Broomfield Hill
2. Fair Annie
3. The Lass of Roch Royal
4. Prince Robert
5. Willie o Winsbury
6. Mary Hamilton
7. Bonnie James Campbell
8. The Rantin Laddie
9. Get Up and Bar the Door
10. The Crafty Farmer
11. The Jovial Tinker
12. The Spanish Maid
13. The Old Wife
14. Kate and the Clothier
15. There Was a Sea Captain
16. The Jolly Boatsman
17. Three Ships Came Sailing In
18. The Gowans Are Gay
19. Ryner Dyne
20. Pretty Polly
21. Slago Town
22. To Cheer the Heart
23. Come All Ye False Lovers
24. Ranting Roving Lad
25. The Soldier Bride's Lament
26. William Bluet
Native American Songs
27. Brave Wolfe
28. Floyd Frazier
29. Talt Hall
30. J. B. Marcum
31. The Tolliver Song
32. The Vance Song
33. John Henry
34. The Yew-Pine Mountains
35. The Irish Peddler
36. Poor Goens
37. Rosanna
38. William Baker
39. Hiram Hubbert
40. The C. O. Wreck
41. Pearl Bryan
42. The Auxville Love
43. Sweet Jane
44. I'm Going To Join the Army
45. Jack Combs
46. The Black Mustache
47. The Married Man
48. Davy Crockett
49. The Bugaboo
50. The Rich and Rambling Boy
51. Bob Sims
52. Charles J. Guiteau
53. Bad Tom Smith
54. Ellen Smith
55. Moonshiner
56. The Gambler
57. Jacob's Ladder
58. The Ship That Is Passing By
59. We Have Fathers Gone to Heaven
60. Who Am Dat a-Walkin'in de Co'n?
Appendix
An Annotated List of the Josiah H. Combs Collection of Songs and Rhymes
Index of Titles and First Lines of Song Texts

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“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.

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