"The spirit of balladry is not dead, but slowly dying. The instincts, sentiments, and feelings which it represents are indeed as immortal as romance itself, but their mode of expression, the folksong, is fighting with its back to the wall, with the odds against it in our introspective age." This statement by Josiah Henry Combs is that of a man who grew up among the members of a singing family in one of the last strongholds of the ballad-making tradition, the Southern Highlands of the United States.

Combs was born in 1886 in Hazard, Kentucky, the heart of the mountain feud area--a...