". . . the guitar is a fairly modern fashion in folksong."

Well . . . maybe. Some of the people that Olive Dame Campbell, Cecil Sharp, and others collected from did accompany themselves on some sort of musical instrument, usually something fairly small and portable. The banjo was fairly common, and some folks made their own instruments. For example, the Appalachian dulcimer. And, if I remember correctly, singer and song collector Frank Warner played a banjo he made himself. And there were a fair number of fiddles around, some store-bought, some home-made.

The "parlor guitar" was fairly common in the 1800s and into the early 1900s. Most "well-appointed" houses had a piano in the parlor, but if they couldn't afford a piano (or sometimes even if they could) there would be a guitar there. Hence, "parlor" guitar.

And the folks in the Southern Appalachians and in the Ozarks and in other presumably isolated areas were not really that isolated. A common item in what might be a meager library (a few school books, a Bible, and a hymnal) would be the latest Montgomery-Ward and/or Sears Roebuck mail-order catalog. You could order things through these catalogs that you couldn't get locally. And they listed a few modestly priced guitars ($2.50 to maybe $15.00) that were reasonably playable.

A singer singing to the accompaniment of a small, portable instrument such as a guitar is a tradition that goes back to the wandering minstrels and troubadours singing to the accompaniment of a lute or similar instrument. Homer's Iliad could be read (by those who could read), but is said to have been chanted to the accompaniment of a lyre or harp.

By the way, large-bodied guitars like Martin Dreadnaughts and Gibson Jumbos are fairly recent. Until these came along, most guitars were somewhat smaller. Some modern classic guitarists have noted that the "heroic stretches" that one sometimes finds in guitar music by composers such as Fernando Sor are not because Sor had huge hands with long fingers, but because the guitar he was playing was smaller, with a somewhat shorter scale-length than modern classic guitars.

Don Firth