Originally released on LP in 1977, as part of The Recorded Anthology of American Music, Oh My Little Darling combines commercial 78s and field recordings from the rural southeast in what amounts to a sampler of American folk song types. Opening with a series of unaccompanied ballads, then moving through single instrument songs, small string bands, cowboy ballads, protest songs and ending with some early gospel and Sacred Harp singing, it makes for a pretty nifty survey of vernacular music in the south. Among the highlights are Fiddlin' John Carson's commercial recording of "The Farmer Is the Man That Feeds Them All" and Daddy John Love's acerbic "Cotton Mill Blues," which contains the bleak couplet "some folks says Saturday is payday/but I says Saturday is another day wasted away."