Shankar Vedantam

As Steve Winnick sifts through the materials, he slowly grasps the enormity of the project.

So he's got 43,000 individual sheets or two sheets of paper, however long it takes, that he's got to then sort into 4,000 categories.

And then in addition to that, he has to cross-reference each of those with all of the places that they've been published.

So there's an enormous number of cross-references within this book that he had to do by hand without the ability to electronically associate one item with another.

What Riley Shepard had been working on since 1960 was a monumental accounting of some 200 years of American folk music.

It involved a search of nearly every available documentary source.

Riley had obtained rare books at great expense, including many that were out of print.

He had collated thousands of songs and organized them according to their provenance, discovering common roots and pathways that linked different musical traditions together.

Since he did not have a computer, almost no one did at the time, he did everything by hand, cross-referencing song lyrics and musical notations and historical footnotes.

Crazy as it sounds, the entire system lived largely inside his own head.

By the point he wrote to the Library of Congress, he had spent nearly two decades trying to put down on paper what was in his head.

Even as his life fell apart around him, and many of his closest friends and relatives came to think of him as a crook.

At the time, as far as I know, no one had attempted something this ambitious in terms of indexing all the songs in America.

Riley Shepard, a man with a fifth grade education, an occasional writer of porn, a con man and hustler, had attempted to create something that would require years of effort by a team of Ph.D.

archivists and a small army of researchers.

The fact of the attempt, I think, is actually a significant achievement.

fact in the history of folk song scholarship in the United States.

And it's actually something almost nobody knows about.

I wouldn't know about it if you hadn't brought it to my attention.

And, you know, I've studied this for quite a number of years.