8. Introduction by Katherine Jackson French

This little volume has a modest, though distinctly unique, purpose—the securing of these quaint renditions of the old English and Scottish ballads for future generations; these, journeying across the seas to Virginia and the Carolinas, were later hidden away in the Kentucky hills for 150 years. They are peculiarly Anglo-American, most characteristic of the traditional history and spirit of their composers of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and likewise, after generations of contact, made to be a part of the blood, bone, and sinew of the settlers in the remote land. Though told in their own homely household speech and illustrative of their own crude life, withal they are poems of the highest art—because they are not artful. They have lived because they were loved, and, with this excuse for existence, they have played for ages on free, generous, and impulsive minds. This, then, becomes an immemorial record of sentiment, loyalty, principle—a conserver of their love for poetry of song. Ballads are then an immemorial record of the pure ancestry of the singer and an undoubted proof of the sturdiness and truth of song in having been sufficient for another period of long yesterdays....