Preface
In 1966, when I was still in graduate school, Ernest Dodge, Director of the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, wrote and asked if I would be interested in looking at a copy of a manuscript of songs written down during the Revolutionary War by an American privateersman confined in Forton Prison near Portsmouth, England.

Introduction
The Manuscript and its Compiler
On January 31, 1893, William Cutter, then the librarian at the Public Library in Woburn, Massachusetts, sent a journal and a manuscript of fifty-seven songs without tunes to the Library of Congress.