More about the location of Mingo Mountain:

According to Berea College faculty member Gladys Jameson's 1955 notes to "Mingo Mountain" furnished by the Berea College Archive, "Mingo Mountain is in West Virginia." This contrasts with my location of the mountain in Mingo Hollow near Middlesboro, Kentucky. (More or less related to Claiborne County, Tennessee's ridge named the Mingo Mountains.)

It also clashes with any assumption that the Mingo Mountain named in the song had anything to do with the hills of Mingo County (where the Mingo Lookout Tower stands) or Logan County in the SW part of WVA.

Mingo Knob is a 4080-ft peak lying toward the northeastern part of West Virginia: Randolph County, in the Cheat Mountain area of the Monongahela National Forest. There is a small community named Mingo in the Tygart Valley there.

If the song does refer to that area, "going back to Mingo Mountain" from Kentucky would be no small journey -- well over 100 miles.

It's unlikely we can pin it down to one or the other at this point. On the one hand Jameson, the song's collector, puts the mountain in West Virginia. On the other hand, she presumably heard "Mingo Mountain" in Kentucky, since she calls it a Kentucky folksong, so I don't know whether she has authority for thinking it refers to a West Virginia locale, or just made that assumption.

My thanks to Joe Offer, and to Harry Rice of the Berea Archive, for furnishing scans of various publications of the song.

Bob

Bob