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.

As I Walked Out      
Barbara Allen      
Charming Beauty Bright      
Fair Nottiman Town      
Frog Went a-Courting      
Her Cheek is Like Some Blooming Red Rose      
John Riley      
Little Sparrow      
Loving Hannah      
Noah's Ark      
Peggy Walker      
Sourwood Mountain      
Sweetheart in the Army      
The Barnyard Song      
The Cherry Tree Carol      
The Cuckoo, First Version      
The Cuckoo, Second Version      
The Inquisitive Lover      
The Lady and the Glove      
The Lonesome Scenes of Winter