Bishop Thomas Percy published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, made up mostly of a loose-leaf manuscript he rescued from a maid using it to light the morning fire. It was published in 1765.

Reading Percy's Reliques inspired Sir Walter Scott to write such works as The Lay of the Last Minstrel and publish his collection The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1803).

The more rigorous scholarship of folklorists would eventually supersede Percy's work, notably Harvard professor Francis James Child with his monumental compilation, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, first publish in ten parts between 1882 and 1898.

Cecil J. Sharp was immensely important to the preservation and promulgation of both English and American folk music. In addition to the work he did in England, which some of our English confreres are better equipped than I am to detail, Sharp, following on work initiated by Olive Dame Campbell, in 1916 to 1918, along with his collaborator Maud Karpeles, travelled through the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee and recorded a treasure trove of folk songs, many English songs and ballads in versions quite different from those Sharp had collected in rural England. Not only did Sharp collect the words, but unlike many of the earlier collectors who were interested primarily in the words ("ancient poetry"), Sharp also collected the melodies, which led to a number of important ethnomusicological discoveries. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians was first published in two volumes in 1917.

Then came the Lomaxes, John, Sr., John, Jr., and Alan. John Sr. collected in the American Southwest and compiled one of the first collections of cowboy songs as sung by real cowboys.

In November 1910, the result of his collecting labors, the anthology, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, was published in 1910, with an introduction by President Theodore Roosevelt. Among the songs included were "Jesse James", "The Old Chisholm Trail", "Sweet Betsy From Pike", and "The Buffalo Skinners" (praised for its Homeric quality by Carl Sandburg and Virgil Thomson). This was the first publication of many of what are considered classic American cowboy songs such as "Git Along Little Dogies", "Sam Bass," and "Home on the Range."

Lomax and his sons went on to collect and make field recordings of songs in prisons and on chain gangs in the South and Southwest and found such singers as Huddie Ledbetter—Lead Belly. Also, they started the Archive of American Folk Song in The Library of Congress.

There followed other collectors, such as poet Carl Sandburg, who not only collected folk songs and published his collections (The American Songbag, 1927), but sang them in his poetry readings as well.

I have two large bookshelves devoted to folk songs and ballads, and laden with these books, and many others, including many less formal song books put together by singers such as Theodore Bikel, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Joan Baez, Tom Glazer, and host of others, from which I learn songs and study them, musically and historically, in order to be able to present them well to my audiences.

There were hordes of collectors, compiling and recording songs all over the country, such as Frank and Anne Warner, Joan O'Bryant, and. . . .    And on and on! A list as long as your leg!

There are folklore societies in practically every state and region of the country. There are at least TWO in the Pacific Northwest alone:   The Seatte Folklore Society and the Pacific Northwest Folklore Society. All of these organizations are dedicated to the collection and preservation of folk music within their purviews, along with presenting this music to the public, frequently in folk festivals free to the public.

So, you see, Conrad, you're a little late with this.

Don Firth

P. S. Go do something you're good at. Have a beer.