George Pullen Jackson may have exhibited slight "racist" tendencies, but his White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands and other collections (Spiritual Folk-Songs of Early America; Down-East Spirituals and Others; White and Negro Spirituals, Their Life Span and Kinship; Another Sheaf of White Spirituals) set the standard for other collectors.

You're right, Joe. Abelard is primarily a songbook, designed for popular use. The 1982 SUNY publication (which I don't have) would certainly be better. I, too, have been scrounging around for Norm Cohen's Long Steel Rail for at least as long as your search has gone on -- to no avail, as yet. I don't sing a lot of railroad songs, but my library is incomplete without his book. Dammit! Now that you have more time on your hands, you'll probably beat me to it when it suddenly appears on some used book web site.

The Bertrand Bronson volumes of the Child ballads are essential to a folksong library, but they are painfully expensive these days. Now that Greenhaus has taken over Camsco, he won't have as much time as he once had to devote to getting Bronson's material into the DT. But the books are worth mortgaging the farm to obtain. I see that the Dover five-volume paperback edition of Child is being offered for $750 on one of the book sites. Unbelievable! One might even find the four volumes of Bronson for less than that! Keep looking!

Jazus! (as Big Mick would say), building a folksong library is becoming an expensive enterprise! Time to investigate Inter-library loan and invest in a good copy machine?

Sandy (the impoverished addict)