Stephen Slade
The songs in this volume have been collected in West Virginia over a period of fifty years, beginning in 1924. I wrote many of them down before the tape recorder came into use, from the singing of people who had preserved them in their family traditions for many generations. After 1950 most of the songs were recorded on tape recorders. But many of them had been recorded in my own mind when I was a small boy, from the singing of my grandfather. --From the introduction