Traipsin' Woman

Bugles hushed 5.000 persons assembled in the hills near Ashland, Ky. last Sunday afternoon. Kentucky's Governor Ruby Laffoon bade them all a deep, drawling welcome. His wife uncovered a bronze tablet. And a rude little log cabin was officially christened "Traipsin" Woman."

The name was for the cabin's owner. Jean Thomas, a small, sprightly blonde who was there dressed in a billowy Elizabethan costume. Mountaineers called her ''the traipsin' woman" because as a court reporter she followed the Law from one hilly settlement to another. Eventually her chief interest became folksongs and ballads, particularly those which could be traced back directly to the folk music of

England. Last week for the fourth time mountaineers came to her cabin to play and sing in an American Folk Song Festival.

The mountaineers, many of them in shirtsleeves, played accordions, dulcimers, banjos, guitars. They sang, as they had heard their parents and grandparents sing, about Sourwood Mountain, turnip greens. old coon dogs, Napoleon Bonaparte. Because many an expert believes that these are the rarest of U. S. folksongs, cameramen were present to film the proceedings for the Library of Congress. Feature of the afternoon was supposed to be an Elizabethan wedding celebration in which Marion Kerby, Chicago ballad expert, soloed. But outsiders were more interested in Jilson Setters, the 75-year-old fiddler whom Miss Thomas took to Lon don a year ago to perform in Albert Hall. Jilson Setters has earned wide publicity for Miss Thomas' folksong society. When he arrived in Manhattan to sail his bag gage consisted of one extra shirt, a quilt his grandmother had made, a gourd for a drinking cup, a corncob pipe and his fiddle wrapped in an oilcloth poke. He came, he said, from Lost Hope Hollow and he was going to see the King. Ashlanders have since said that there is no such place as Lost Hope Hollow, that Jilson Setters' real name is William Day. never much of a mountaineer, but an oldtime beggar.

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