Ellen tells a story about this family photograph:

“This is a photo of me and my brother, Jim. We are 16 years and 21 years old, respectively, and Jim has a new guitar he is playing. We are in our back yard making a good deal of noise. I believe we frightened all the birds. I am playing my old KEY guitar that I had covered with lumber varnish after I had stained it brown with shoe polish. I am just three years from having had polio and spending a year in the hospital and in Florida getting physical therapy. I had also learned the beginning skills of how to play, and not just stare at the instrument. I was in high school and Jim was home from college. I had not yet met the folk singing social group of friends in our suburban home town. We were located sixteen miles as the crow flies out of New York City, where the Folksong Revival was starting.

“I had already spent a year delving into the four volumes of Vance Randolph’s Ozark Folksongs that my father had gotten for me. He had read about them in the New York Times, and though he had little education, somehow he sensed that the four books would be important for me. He was right, although I think he never realized why. At first, the books were a mystery. But I was fairly solitary and I poured over them. I found worlds I never dreamed of and I struggled to learn to play the instrument well enough to unlock the secrets in those silent melodies I could not hear by just looking. They sat next to the verses and verses that were piled on one another. I could read the words and Iearned about sailors leaving for the cruel sea, old women who beat up the little devils when visiting hell, leather-winged bats that could talk, and cruel lovers who poisoned one another.

“Someday, I thought, I might be playing these songs on one of those TV programs we watched on the small box behind that giant magnifying glass.”