249

UTAH CARROLL 66

WARS OF GERMANY, THE 204

WAY DOWN IN MEXICO 314

WESTWARD HO 37

WHEN THE WORK IS DONE THIS FALL 53

WHOOPEE-TI-YI-YO, GIT ALONG LITTLE DOGIES 87

WHOSE OLD COW 362

WILD ROVERS 383

WINDY BILL 381

U-S-U RANGE 92

YOUNG CHARLOTTIE 239

YOUNG COMPANIONS 81

ZEBRA DUN, THE 154

INTRODUCTION

It is now four or five years since my attention was called to the
collection of native American ballads from the Southwest, already
begun by Professor Lomax. At that time, he seemed hardly to appreciate
their full value and importance. To my colleague, Professor G.L.
Kittredge, probably the most eminent authority on folk-song in
America, this value and importance appeared as indubitable as it
appeared to me. We heartily joined in encouraging the work, as a real
contribution both to literature and to learning. The present volume is
the first published result of these efforts.

The value and importance of the work seems to me double. One phase of
it is perhaps too highly special ever to be popular. Whoever has begun
the inexhaustibly fascinating study of popular song and literature--of
the nameless poetry which vigorously lives through the centuries--must
be perplexed by the necessarily conjectural opinions concerning its
origin and development held by various and disputing scholars. When
songs were made in times and terms which for centuries have been not
living facts but facts of remote history or tradition, it is impossible
to be sure quite how they begun, and by quite what means they sifted
through the centuries into the forms at last securely theirs,
in the final rigidity of print. In this collection of American
ballads, almost if not quite uniquely, it is possible to trace the
precise manner in which songs and cycles of song--obviously analogous
to those surviving from older and antique times--have come into being.
The facts which are still available concerning the ballads of our own
Southwest are such as should go far to prove, or to dis