Warde H. Ford came originally from Crandon, WI, according to the notes on Folkways LP "Wolf River Songs" (ca.1955), which features Ford and members of his family as Cowell recorded them in the early '50s. (Sorry I don't have the booklet, but you can get the album on CD through Smithsonian Folkways for about $20.)

Ford was a significant trad singer, perhaps in his forties when he sang "The Flying Cloud" for collector Cowell. Between 1938 and 1954 he sang about sixty songs for Cowell and the Library of Congress - songs of all kinds, from Child ballads like "Barbara Allan" and "Andrew Batann" to sentimental broadsides and lumbering ballads("My Bonnie Black Bess," "Foreman Monroe") to bawdry ("Sergeant Tally-Ho") to Civil War ballads ("The Cumberland's Crew") to vaudeville songs ("Barney McShane," "Jerry Will You Ile that Car" and "Alderman of the Ward") to miscellanea like "Putting on the Agony," "Granny Will Your Dog Bite?" and "Bill Bailey."

As "The Flying Cloud" shows, he liked long ballads with plenty of detail and melodrama: his L. of C. recordings of the very rare "Battle of Antietam Creek" and "Custer's Last Charge" (beginning "Along the Big Horn's crystal tide...") are classics of this long-forgotten and now utterly alien musical genre. Such songs were ideal - one supposes - for singing under the stars when the campfire flickered low and there seemed to be all the time in the world to spin a tale of the sadness of fate, even in a dream-world of Victorian gentility that was at least a world away from the real lives of lumbermen, soldiers, and sailors.

At any rate, Ford's "Flying Cloud" has roots in Wisconsin rather than in California.