Bobby, I appreciate your response on this. It's obvious that others in the Madison County region (and also just over the mountain in Tennessee) who must have known "Black is the Color" besides Lizzie Roberts and just because Sharp didn't find them doesn't mean they weren't there. And the fact that there were different versions and relationships to other songs also current at the end of the 19th century would show that the more recent versions are not necessarily all dependent upon Sharp's collection. Your background on this puts the Roberts' version in a much clearer context, and nicely ties together the versions I posted earlier in this thread from Dellie Norton and the one collected by Henry, your own version, and Evelyn Ramsay's and Sheila Adams' versions. I'll have to go look up the versions in the Brown Collection. Surely I've seen them but I don't recall them at the moment. And I completely missed seeing the one in Leonard Roberts' collection from Kentucky! Thanks.