Beginning in the 1840s a good number of these songs were performed on the banjo.
Today we only have musical notation, modern players like Bob Flesher, Bob Carlin, others and our imagination to guess what the music really sounded like back then.
The following performances many years later (from the 1920s & 1930s) are mostly by southern rural artists.
On these recordings the instrumentation is different and there are some changes to the tunes and lyrics.
We can compare our modern performances with these recordings for a broader perspective.