I live about 20 miles from where Merle Travis was from. Alot of his early songs were traditional local folk songs or popular songs written by local musicans and writers. Mose Rager, Ike Everly, Kennedy Jones,... and others are the ones that really helped Travis and wrote alot of his early material. So in my book Travis is hard to put in a category. All of those guys (Travis included) would gather at a town called Cleaton Ky and have all night jam sessions on the weekends. There they would swap songs and stories and later Travis took alot of them to the world.