Over the years, s I have collected many early Country Music recordings,many a time I had wanted to know how and where the early ballads had originated. I noticed that the structure old ballads betrayed an earlier provenance, some as far back as the Tudor period. Many of these ballads re-appeared a century or two later in the hills of Appalachia, imported by the ancestors of present day Appalachian people. Often the songs differed from the original lyrics. This was due to their rural habitation, different dialects also inhibited by the remoteness of their homesteads in the hills. The songs were passed down orally from one generation to another. In many cases they were no longer the same words, they had evolved into home- grown American ballads, their origin long forgotten.This book is intended to fill in a few gaps here and there and to give us a more concise idea of how this music evolved, prior to its commercial transition and non-rural status.