This syllabus, or finding-list, is offered to lovers of folk-literaturein the hope that it may not be without interest and value to them forpurposes of comparison and identification. It includes 333 items,exclusive of 114 variants, and embraces all popular songs that have sofar come to hand as having been "learned by ear instead of by eye," asexisting through oral transmission—song-ballads, love-songs,number-songs, dance-songs, play-songs, child-songs, counting-out rimes,lullabies, jigs, nonsense rimes, ditties, etc.
There is every reason to believe that many more such await thecollector; in fact, their number is constantly being increased eventoday by the creation of new ones, by adaptation of the old, and even bytheabsorptionand consequent metamorphosis, of literary,quasi-literary, or pseudo-literary types into the current of oraltradition.
This collection, then, is by no means complete: means have not beenavailable for a systematic and scientific search for these folk-songs,which have been gathered very casually during the past five yearsthrough occasional travel, acquaintanceship, and correspondence in onlythe twenty-one following counties: Fayette, Madison, Rowan, Elliott,Carter, Boyd, Lawrence, Morgan, Johnson, Pike, Knott, Breathitt, Clay,Laurel, Rockcastle, Garrard, Boyle, Anderson, Shelby, Henry, andOwen—all lying in Central and Eastern Kentucky.
All of the material listed has thus been collected in this State, thougha variant of The Jew's Daughter, page 8, has come by chance fromMichigan, and another of The Pretty Mohee, page 12, was sent fromGeorgia. The Cumberland Mountain region, in the eastern part of theState, has naturally furnished the larger half of the material, becauseof local conditions favorable to the propagation of folk-song. However,sections of Kentucky lying farther to the westward are almost equallyprolific. The wide extension of the same ballad throughout the Stateargues convincingly for the unity of the Kentucky stock—a fact whichmay be confirmed in more ways than one.[Pg 4]
The arrangement is as follows: The material in hand is loosely groupedin eighteen sections, ac