Musicology Commons^™

Jean Thomas' American Folk Song Festival : British Balladry In Eastern Kentucky., Marshall A. Portnoy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Serious musicological research initiated in the first decades of the twentieth century in America uncovered vast riches of British folk music that had been transplanted to these shores by early pioneers. In the mountains of Appalachia, traditional British ballads remained miraculously unspoiled, and distinguished researchers from Britain and America published many volumes of such songs. Jean Thomas, a legal stenographer born in eastern Kentucky in 1881, became fascinated with this phenomenon. She came to believe that an annual festival of mountain music would help ensure the survival of this art and, in 1930, she founded the American Folk Song Festival. …