John Jacob Niles was a personal friend who lived on Boone Creek in Clark County, Kentucky. He was a very interesting fellow - he was born in Louisville, KY and he flew in the Lafayette Escadrille in WWI where he was shot down and wounded. He returned to Louisvile, and started out his musical career by travelling around Kentucky "collecting" folksongs when that was a popular endeavor and "polishing" them up and holding them out to the scholars as "collected works." They were accepted as such by academia and Mr. Niles performed these songs, many of which were more like art songs and quite suited to his unique vocal range (and also quite difficult for others to sing if they didn't have much range).

Everything was going fine until Burl Ives tried to record one of Mr. Niles' songs attributing it to the public domain - I don't remember which one but it may have been Black is the Color. Mr. Niles took great exception to this and in the end, had to come clean that he indeed had not "collected" the song but had instead, written it. This of course, besmirched his reputation with the scholarly community as a collector of folk music and all of the other songs he had allegedly "collected" were suspect.   I believe in truth, he collected a small piece of the melody for Black is the Color - mainly the 3 notes used on Black, black, black - and he composed the rest of that song. He never liked Burl Ives much after that and never had much kind to say about him;-)

I remember the first time I met Mr. Niles. He looked at me (I had very long hair then) and said in his most intimidating voice, "Girl . . . . you can't be a folksinger. . . you're wearing shoes!!!!"

His publisher for years was G. Shirmer.

Louise in Lex