Music: Singin' Gatherin'

The rough stage, with the windowless cabin in the background, looked synthetic. The linsey-woolsey costumes looked as if they had just come out of attic trunks. But the music—the singing, fiddling and twanging of guitars, banjos and dulcimers—was the real McCoy: mountain music, with rough edges as unpolished as stones. On the hills near Ashland, Ky., country folk and tourists gathered this week for Ashland's twelfth annual American Folk Song Festival.

On hand to sing old Scottish scolding ballads was Mrs. Lyda Messer Caudill, who says she is a hillbilly descendant of Mary Queen...