In 1950, Maud Karpeles embarked on a song collecting expedition to the Appalachian Mountains with the American scholar and fieldworker Sidney Robertson Cowell. Their plan was to retrace the journeys made by Karpeles with Cecil Sharp over thirty years earlier and to revisit some of the singers they had met previously, with the aim of making tape recordings on a machine supplied by the Library of Congress. Although many of the people they targeted were dead or otherwise indisposed, they succeeded in recording fifteen survivors or close relatives of singers encountered by Sharp, and a few unknown to him. Their accounts of the trip, in diaries and letters, reveal personal tensions and a fundamentally different view of the nature of folk song, Karpeles's purist approach contrasting with Cowell's view of a dynamic tradition. Karpeles revisited the mountains in 1955 with Evelyn Wells and succeeded in adding to the total of recordings. The material they collected provides a valuable snapshot of Appalachian ballad singing at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]