Folk Songs of the Hills

Folk Songs of the Hills
Studio album by Merle Travis
Released	1947
Recorded	1946
Genre	Traditional, country, Americana, bluegrass
Label	Capitol
Producer	Lee Gillette
Merle Travis chronology
Folk Songs of the Hills (1947) The Merle Travis Guitar (1956)

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[1]

Folk Songs of the Hills is a 1947 album by American singer Merle Travis. It is a collection of traditional songs from his home of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, including original compositions evoking working life on the railroads and in the coal mines. Each song, accompanied by Travis on his own acoustic guitar, is introduced by a short narrative. Because of these characteristics, the album can be considered an early example of the concept album in popular music, along with Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads and Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours. First issued as a 78 rpm box set album in 1947, this collection has remained in print in LP and CD reissues up to the present, with additional tracks from the same period added in later editions (the original album had eight songs, the most recent edition has 13).

Folk Songs of the Hills is widely regarded as one of Travis' finest achievements. A seminal work in his career, it brought him fame as an interpreter of traditional American folk music, as a brilliant finger-style guitarist, and as a folk-inspired composer whose songs "Dark as a Dungeon" and "Sixteen Tons", included in all editions of this album, have become classics of folk, country and popular music. In 2018, it was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".^[2]