"The Southern mountains, the Appalachians and the Ozarks, are home to many kinds of traditional music: Old World ballads, fiddle and banjo tunes, and all manner of religious songs. Van Colbert, a fine old-time singer and banjo picker from the Missouri Ozarks, has a special interest in another category of mountain songs: ballads of murder, mayhem, and hard-case perpetrators, and delivers them here with authority and authenticity. He doesn't shy away from loaded terms like"hillbilly" and"thug-life" to describe them; wasn't Jesse James' six-shooter loaded as well? For better or worse, these songs are American to the core, and nobody can interpret them better than Van." -- Art Rosenbaum: banjo player, artist, folklorist.