INTRODUCTION



     This syllabus, or finding-list, is offered to lovers of folk-
literature in the hope that it may not be without interest and
value to them for purposes of comparison and identifica-
tion. It includes 333 items, exclusive of 114 variants, and
embraces all popular songs that have so far come to hand as
having been "learned by ear instead of by eye," as existing
through oral transmission song-ballads, love-songs, number-
songs, dance-songs, play-songs, child-songs, counting-out
rimes, lullabies, jigs, nonsense rimes, ditties, etc.
    There is every reason to believe that many more such
await the collector; in fact, their number is constantly being
increased even today by the creation of new ones, by adapta-
tion of the old, and even by the absorbtion, and consequent
metamorphosis, of literary, quasi-literary, or pseudo-literary
types into the current of oral tradition.
    This collection, then, is by no means complete: means
have not been available for a systematic and scientific search
for these folk-songs, which have been gathered very casually
during the past five years through occasional travel, acquaint-
anceship, and correspondence in only the twenty-one, follow-
ing counties: Fayette, Madison, Rowan, Elliott, Carter,
Boyd, Lawrence, Morgan, Johnson, Pike, Knott, Breathitt,
Clay, Laurel, Rockcastle, Garrard, Boyle, Anderson, Shelby,
Henry, and Owen-all lying in Central and Eastern Ken-
tuckv.
    All of the material listed has thus been collected in this
State, though a variant of The Jew's Daughter, page 8,
has come by chance from Michigan, and another of The
Pretty Mohee, page 12, was sent from Georgia. The Cumn-
berland Mountain region, in the eastern part of the State,
has naturally furnished the larger half of the material, be-
cause of local conditions favorable to the propagation of folk-
song. However, sections of Kentucky lying farther to the
westward are almost equally prolific. The wide extension of
the same ballad throughout the State argues convincingly for
the unity of the Kentucky stock-a fact which may be con-
firmed in more wavs than one.