This excellent collection of songs is sure to add some wonderful breadth to your choir's folk music repertoire. 'Bagels & Biscuits' is an exciting piece that should be performed with fun, laughter, and abondon; it includes a solo in the middle of the song that can be sung by either a tenor or soprano. Stephen Foster wrote 'Camptown Races' for a minstrel show around 1850, subtitling it 'Gwine to Run All Night' and composing the text in a minstrel-show dialect. This standard english version, by Melinda Bargreen, pays great tribute to the original. 'The Cuckoo' is a simple mountain ballad and should be sung in a flowing, legato style. The pianisimos in measures 10 and 25 are to remind singers not to "pounce" on the melodic leaps, but rather to maintain the quiet reflective mood of the song. Inspired by stories of Sudanese basket weavers, 'Famine Song' exprresses the pain and hope experienced by those in the famine of the 1980s. In the midst of hardship, a wonderful new sense of creativity emerged when women began weaving baskets as a means of survival. Central to the song is a section of improvisation over shifting chors - VIDA's (the folk vocal group who wrote this piece) recorded improvisation is written as a guide on the top of the staves. VIDA saw the two improvising voices as the voices of women from other cultures raised in empathy.