In the spring of 1958, two fifteen-year-old boys shivered and chunked up their fire while the sky turned to a pre-dawn gray along a stretch of the Ouachita River in Hot Springs County, Arkansas. They should have been making one last run of their trotlines but, instead, they rolled tightly into their blankets and slept another hour. One of them was a reader of history and, drifting back to sleep, he half-dreamed, as young boys do, about explorers in some faraway wilderness, opening new land for king and country. History, to him, consisted of great things that took place somewhere else. He never imagined that the place where he slept would soon yield evidence of a successful Caddo civilization that lived for half a millinium along those riverbanks. He didn't know to look nearby for shards of storage jars scattered by men from De Soto's expedition when they raided a granary stocked by the Caddo, and for minie balls left by General Steele's Civil War troops. He didn't know that he and his buddy had strung a trotline over huge, sunken pine logs from the sawmill that started a half century sweep of Ouchita Mountain timber. He didn't suspect that power lines near the riverbanks had been among the first in the nation to carry hydroelectric power. The stories had been there, but he had never heard them. The stories are everywhere in Arkansas, as they are in every other place. They are best found and told by those nearest them but, with these songs, we offer a handful we have found. We hope for more to come. - Charley Sandage