Interesting thread to revive. Many years ago now when National Public Radio was playing all sorts of folksong programs (before a financial crunch that ended much of it in the late 1980's) there were programs that played this sort of song. I remember one lovely historic song from the POV of a young woman coal miner in Kentucky. If anyone can figure out where all of those recorded programs went when NPR went almost belly-up, you might find quite a rich source of material in general, and not on just this subject. Folksong USA, something like that, was at the heart of those programs.

Maggie