The specific type of white folk music being discussed here comes from "The White South," identified by musicologist Alan Lomax as "The Southern Appalachian and Ozark Mountains, not forgetting southern Illinois, southern Indiana and the lower South from Florida to Texas; Arkansas; Missouri; the backwoods of the South from the early days to the present. ⁽¹⁾ Most of the white European inhabitants that peopled these regions were Scots-Irish who immigrated in the early to mid 18th century. ⁽²⁾ Africans-Americans, initially brought to the American continent as captives beginning in the 17th century, soon became a well established and self-sustaining population in this region as well. When the slave trade was abolished in 1809, the slave population continued to thrive without the addition of any new imports. ⁽³⁾ While blacks and whites mixed uneasily on a social basis, those groups did occupy the same region and contact was unavoidable, a fact that is pointed out by Lomax.

While the American people were clearing up the new, raw land of the United States, they found time for remembering the folk songs and folk dances of their ancestors in Europe and in Africa. They set about at once making new ballads and adapting the old tunes, steps and stanzas to the setting of pioneer life and to the tense and reckless pace of a fast growing democracy. ⁽⁴⁾