Rick: I apparently loaned my old copy of Belden's Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folk Song Society (a fine regional collection) to someone with the same return-policy as your friends enjoy. Looked for a long time to replace it, but good old "Liam's Brother" beat me to it. The shocker was, he got it to give to me! With friends like that, who needs philanthropists?

Keeping the thread going, however, I find Vance Randolph's Ozark Folksongs, four volumes, Columbia, Missouri, 1946-1950, invaluable. Vance did more research among old songsters than almost any other folksong collector, most of whom limited their studies to the more scholarly collections. Maybe that's because he was self-taught and not a timid academician unwilling to go out on a limb. I loved him!

The Frank C. Brown collection of North Carolina material, mentioned above, is a very important source, I agree, but be a little cautious. I can't tell you the page number, but I had to laugh when I saw that they printed "T for Texas, T for Tennessee" with the notation: "We have not found this piece reported in other collections." Randolph would have recognized it!

Sandy