In her famous Little House series of eight books Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) loosely traces her family’s history through episodes located in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, and South Dakota over a period from 1867 to 1885. Embedded in the stories are references to 127 separate songs and tunes. Surely, few if any books in American literature of comparable standing and popularity feature America’s common, vernacular music so centrally, assign it such a major narrative role, and index it in such...