They say Bascom Lamar Lunsford got the banjo song "Dry Bones" from an itinerant black preacher named Romney traveling through South Turkey Creek, North Carolina.  Lunsford recorded it in 1928.   

I hitch hiked to Abbey Feale, Ireland in 1978 and drank poteen with my grandmother's brothers and sat in a circle with the locals and people sang and told stories and shared music.  Well it wasn't until years later I had a pocket full of crumpled bills from bartending tips that I walked into Lark Street Music in Albany, N.Y. and bought a banjo off the wall and took it back to my one room apartment thinking maybe I could do what my Irish uncles had done -- play traditional music, share music.  But it takes a long time to get the instrument to start to sound right and to start to match the words and voice to it.  By dumb luck I found old LPs of the Anthology of American Folk Music at the Schenectady County Public Library and studied it and pondered it. So the great Anthology became a principal reference in a particularly American library - a library of songs and instruments, unpolished singing styles and poetry.  Blind Lemon Jefferson singing of death on a pale horse and AP Carter bringing forth songs of outcasts and the down-trodden two outstanding poets along with many others helping keep the past alive  -- giving me an idea --