The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Songs, by
Hubert G. Shearin and Josiah H. Combs

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Title: A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Songs

Author: Hubert G. Shearin
Josiah H. Combs

Release Date: October 16, 2008 [EBook #26937]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SYLLABUS OF KENTUCKY FOLK-SONGS ***

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Transcriber's note

Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved. Minor punctuation
errors have been corrected without notice. A few obvious typographical
errors have been corrected, and they are listed at the end of this book.

Transylvania University Studies in English

II

A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Songs

By

HUBERT G. SHEARIN, A. M. Ph. D.
Professor of English Philology in Transylvania University

and

JOSIAH H. COMBS, A. B.
Editor of The Transylvanian

Transylvania Printing Company
Lexington, Kentucky
1911

TO

R. M. S.

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 identification. 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 adaptation of the old, and even by
the absorption 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