What the great folklorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided us were not so much records of performances but rather interpreta’ tions or versions of performances: They were not only editors of what they found but also participants in the line of performers they documented. Men, for example, folklorist Vance Randolph spent an evening listening to stories
or songs and then went home and wrote up the stories he had heard or sat at
the piano and worked out songs he had heard, he was doing exactly what many folk performers do.