Then Sid put down his fiddle and his mouth harp and drawing from his coat pocket a crumpled paper, he began again. "My friends, I want to read you this piece in the _Chicago Daily News_. This is the place to read it. We ought to be warned about what can happen in this country to our music, by what has happened to some of our people. Though maybe sometime it's been for the best. This piece was writ by a mighty knowing man. His name is Robert J. Casey and he flew from Chicago for his paper the _Chicago Daily News_ to hear with his own ears the music of the mountains from the lips of mountain singers at Traipsin' Woman cabin on the Mayo Trail the second Sunday in June, 1938." There was a moment's breathless silence over the great gathering there in Snead's Grove. The look of fear and apprehension gave way to that of eagerness and hope as Devil Anse Hatfield's kinsman read with quiet dignity: "'One breathes a sigh for the Hatfields and McCoys who maintain the Democratic majority in cemeteries along the West Virginia line. One voices a word of commendation for the Hatfields and the McCoys who drive taxi-cabs in Ashland or run quiet, respectable and legal beer parlors in Huntington. And looking from one group to the other, one realizes that something has happened to the hill country. "'A person of imagination standing on the tree-shaded porch of the Traipsin' Woman cabin up in Lonesome Hollow probably still can hear echoes of "the singing gathering" which only a few hours ago demonstrated the essential durability of the hill folks.... Where a day or two ago there was only a neutral interest in such proceedings, now people are talking of Elizabethan culture preserved completely for a matter of centuries by people who lived on the wrong side of the tracks, just a few rods from the fence of the rolling mills. "'There is a tendency in some quarters to look upon the sing-festival as a permanent and predictable community asset. But that is because the sophisticated and urban population is ignoring the present status of the McCoys and the Hatfields, as for many years it has ignored the crack-voiced "ballet" singers and the left-handed virtuosi in its own backyard.'"