American Mountain Songs

American Mountain Songs is a collection of 61 songs that Ethel Park Richardson gathered in the mountains of Tennessee, North Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Virginia, and Missouri. It was edited and arranged for voice and piano by the musicologist Sigmund Spaeth. The songs are grouped as ballads, lonesome and love songs, spirituals, and nonsense songs. Spaeth recommended Richardson for the project after he found that she already knew hundreds of old songs. She gathered much of the material over a few months, traveling by car and then by mule between mountain settlements. In his introduction, Spaeth notes that Richardson made an effort to include unfamiliar tunes. Greenberg, the publisher, released the book in 1927 and reissued it in 1955.

Ethel Park Richardson (1883 to date unknown) was a folklorist, singer, and radio writer, born Ethel Sloan Park in Decherd, Tennessee. Her father, Lunsford Yandell Park, was an old-time fiddler. She was a poet and schoolteacher before this book, her first collecting project, took her into the field. After it was published she performed the songs on lecture tours and on radio, first at WDOD in Chattanooga and then on NBC. There she created “Hillbilly Heart-Throbs” in 1933, a series that dramatized mountain ballads for a national audience. In the early 1950s she won $100,000 on the NBC quiz show “The Big Surprise,” competing on American folklore.

Collection copy: 1955 reprint. Originally published in 1927. Collected by Ethel Park Richardson, edited by Sigmund Spaeth. Purchased at a vintage market in Virginia.