"Sourwood Mountain" is a classic among traditional mountain folk songs of the southern Appalachians. It appears in most of the many collections by collectors like Cecil Sharp, Frank Brown, Bascomb Lunsford and other folklorists in the early 1900s across North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia & Missouri. It is classified as dance music or a play-party song, or maybe just an unaccompanied singing song. It was recorded by Fiddlin' Powers, Uncle Am Stuart, Tommy Jarrell, Ben Jarrell and his Uncle Charlie Lowe, The Booker Brothers, Al Hopkins and His Buckle Busters, Hobart Smith, Ernest V. Stoneman and the North Carolina Corn Shuckers and almost everybody else who played a banjo or fiddle.