1925 Folk-Songs of the South

Description

Folding Maps, Publishers' Original Binding, Scarce, With Dustwrapper

This fascinating text takes a historical and musical look at life in the South, including one hundred and eighty five songs in three hundred and ninety eight variants, along with twenty nine tunes for twenty six different songs, collected and edited by John Harrington Cox. Cox was one of the pioneers in the field of American folk song scholarship, collecting his first folk song in 1913. Two years later, he presided over the founding of the West Virginia Folklore Society, serving as its first president, archivist, and editor, and within this society he established a network of field collectors across the state. During the early 1920s, Cox organized and edited an extensive body of the folk songs collected under the Society’s auspices as the basis of his Ph.D. dissertation, which was eventually published as this text, 'Folk-Songs of the South' by the Harvard University Press in 1925. The first major collection of American folk songs by an American editor to appear in print, the volume became a model in both its scholarship and format for many subsequent American folk song publications. Moreover, regardless of style or subject, the songs offer a valuable insight into everyday life in the Old South. Including an original dustwrapper and a map of West Virginia.