First thing would be to check with Joe Offer. If he OKs it, I'd sugggest that the permathread serve first as an index to the other existing threads on Civil War songs, and then you could search up the ones that have been posted, individually, like I did for the permathread on spirituals, and list those too. (One thing that would help is if people runnning index-threads like that could have edit authorization to go back into old threads without making a new post in them, to insert keywords (such as @civil war) to help harvestors or researchers later.)

As far as where to draw the line on the time period or the cultural criteria-- if you start with the ones you KNOW fit, and work from there, soon you will develop a taste and sense for the criteria, as you go along. In my case I have been SO LUCKY to have a GREAT bunch of folks working on the spirituals project, who have a keen sense of the cultural and musical sensibilities.... it seems to me that we amount to a de facto consensus, and we sometimes have discussed such matters offthread to get an understanding.

So if Joe OKs the idea, your next step (IMO) would be to recruit a Mudcat volunteer to do the thread-edits, and a group of people who care about this sub-genre and who will take on specified parts of the job and work well together.

~Susan