Original notes by Alan Lomax adapted and expanded by Anna Lomax Wood

Ballads and old-time music from Missouri and Arkansas, the territory that gave us Jesse James, Jimmie Driftwood, Mark Twain, and Bill Clinton, and that saw the birth of ragtime. It was a meeting place for several cultural strains — the Northern topical ballad and the banjo-picking, high lonesome musical style of the South, resulting in a freewheeling and distinctively creative American folk idiom. Includes Neal Morris’s “Sing Anything.”  

“We should have more recordings from the free and easy Ozarks.” —Alan Lomax