Have more time for reading these days and glad to see the suggestions here. Though these books have been mentioned elsewhere on Mudcat, they might be appropriate here as well; Sharyn McCrumb's novels about Frankie Silver and Tom Dooley. Her other books in the "ballad novel" series take names from folk songs or other songs from antiquity but though interesting, to me at least, because of the setting as well as gift of tale telling, are not necessarily about folk music.