As someone who's long focused on Appalachian and other southern songs, it took me a while to appreciate just how biased the recording industry, and the resulting musicianship and scholarship, were. Neglect of the very active traditional and "oldtime" music of New York state was the area I first heard complaints about, and started to broaden my views. Time spent in the Pine Barrens, plus hearing the Pineconers and other local musicians there and elsewhere, helped changed my mind further.

It's easy to trace what happened. The primary collectors, spurred by the Texan Lomaxes, worked in the south and west. Cowboy songs and minstrel show favorites dominated what popular musical market there was for old song material. When the Northeast was combed for folksongs, New England was the primary focus. New York was finally done justice by Thompson's Body, Boots and Britches and Norman Cazden's scholarly and popular work.

But the in-between areas whose traditions didn't jump out and hit you over the head, among them New Jersey, mostly fell by the wayside. (Despite Halpert's and other little-known collection efforts, for which we can give thanks.)

So -- despite George Korson's efforts to the west -- did southeast Pennsylvania, where I grew up. Just an example -- not to distract from the Pine Barrens focus of this thread -- but to show how unexpectedly widespread homemade music was before 1950.

We didn't think we were a "traditional" area, certainly nothing to attract a folklorist, still less a recording scout. And yet I remember that, for example, my babysitter brought me up on "Billy Boy" (her favorite) and other songs she'd learned herself as a child around 1920. Songs Mother had learned in camp in the 20s (some of it still in the camp repertoire today. like "Where Do Mosquitoes Go," "My Mother Was a Lady," and "Where Do You Work-a John") got sung around the house.

In those years German was still the first language of many Dublin residents, just to illustrate how non-homogeneous America was then, and German speech, and German accents, were rife around us. One of the local volunteer firemen in Dublin PA was a banjo player -- first banjo I ever saw -- and played in the firemen's band (another institution gone to dust; it's TVs in firehouses now instead of musical instruments and checkerboards).

When I was just a tad my grandfather invited me over to hear a visitor sing; one of his songs was the rare "Cork Leg." Imagine anyone coming out with that in someone's living room today! My uncle Richard sang traditional and other weird songs (several of them bawdy) he'd gotten from goodness knows where. As an eight-year-old I went to a minstrel show (!) put on by several members of the local Lions Club including our neighbor Mr. Yoder up the road, and was young enough to be scared by the blackened faces. When I was a teen we square danced to a live band at Phillips Mill on the Delaware not far from New Hope. And so on and on. Yet we didn't for one minute think of ourselves as in a tradition at all.

The point is, we weren't unusual. This much local music was typical before the 1950s in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and many other uncelebrated places. Dance halls were everywhere in city and countryside, and bands composed of fiddle, guitar, sometimes banjo, piano and/or accordion played in them, square and Virginia reel dance callers were common. (More or less ethnic polka bands impinged too.) Radios were a late-come novelty; people pretty much everywhere still sang for themselves and others as routine entertainment and accompaniment to living, and a great many people knew at least some songs they could informally sing.

Half a century of media since has "paved over" that whole reality, leaving us poorer and less capable of entertaining ourselves not as a special effort, but as a matter of course. The magnitude of that change is rarely noticed, but it was like an earthquake when TV came and erased everything. For a long while you could hear talk of nothing else but what was "on." TV's hegemony to this day obscures a great deal that is in plain sight, known to lots of people, but has no wide recognition and thus is taken to be somehow "not quite as real as if it had been on TV."

I think at least a few people have started to come out of that coma, and I hope more will. As they discover fascinating focuses of history, daily living and music like the Pine Barrens, they have a chance to break the spell and find the "old weird America" right there underneath ... and snatch it back before it vanishes.

This thread is part of that. I'm looking eagerly forward to see what further surprises are coming. Thanks everyone for your contributions. Bob