Lighter wrote:-
"Frank Proffitt apparently never got a dime from the Kingston Trio's zillion-dollar version of "Tom Dooley" in the 1950s, and few professional folklorists were terribly bothered.

I don't believe this to be true. I work with Jeff Warner on his multi-media show From The Mountains To The Sea and in the show Jeff tells the story of his parents, Frank and Anne collecting songs from Frank Proffitt. Here is a quotation from the script (as presented by Jeff but written by him jointly with his brother, Gerret :-

Frank Proffitt sang the Warner's three songs that first afternoon on the Beech: Dan Do, Moonshine and Tom Dooley. Later on, in '41, when the Warners stayed with Frank and his wife Bessie for several days, they had a portable recording machine made for them by Philco Electronics. There, at the house Frank built when he married Rena Hicks, the Warners recorded Tom Dooley and the beginnings of a 100 song repertoire from Proffitt's mountain past. Frank Warner was moved by the song Tom Dooley. He took it back to New York where he sang it for collector Alan Lomax, who included the song in his 1947 book Folk Song USA. The book and the song made its way around America, and in 1958, was recorded by a west coast singing group, the Kingston Trio, who sold 6 million copies of the song and, in doing so, helped to generate the folk song revival, which continues on a half-century later.
The story of the Dooley recording is long—and for another time—but Lomax' s publisher and the Kingston Trio's Capitol Records settled a suit out of court in 1962, and from that settlement, Frank Proffitt made enough to build a new house there in Watauga County.