It is said that Bascom Lamar Lunsford would "cross hell on a rotten rail to get a folk song" — his Southern highlands folk-song compilations now constitute one of the largest collections of its kind in the Library of Congress — but he did much more than acquire songs. He preserved and promoted the Appalachian mountain tradition for generations of people, founding in 1928 the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina,

This book explores the world in which one of the oddest and most interesting trends in Latin music over the last 30 years has risen, the narcocorrido. Narcocorridos are Mexican ballads about the daring deeds of cross-border drug traffickers. Tracing the narcocorrido from its birth during the Mexican Revolution, up through its recent developments on the Mexican West Coast, the cradle of drug traffic. From there, the story moves to Los Angeles, where