Kansas seems an unlikely place to discover a link between the refined parlor music of the 19th century and the country and blues guitar styles of the rural South in the early 20th. But in 2006, researchers and archivists here at the Kansas Historical Society uncovered the importance of a relatively unknown manuscript collection donated to the Historical Society in 1968 by the family of Kansas artist Henry Worrall. 
When Henry and Mary Worrall moved to Topeka, Kansas, from Cincinati, Ohio, in 1867, Henry was already a noted artist. In Kansas, Worrall became a prolific and renowned illustrator and decorator. His artistic creations would capture some of the most iconic imagery of early life in Kansas and the American West. For more on this topic, see Robert Taft’s 1946 article on Worrall in the Kansas Historical Quarterly.
But Worrall was much more than a visual artist, he was also an accomplished musician who composed and arranged popular music for solo acoustic guitar. During the 1850s, Worrall shared the same publisher as Stephen Foster, the Cincinnati music publisher W. C. Peters and Sons, where Worrall published his most famous works “Sebastopol” and “Spanish Fandango.” These tunes became quite popular and were included as standard pieces in guitar instruction manuals from the 1850s through the 1920s. 
While the rest of the country had mostly forgotten about the parlor music after the introduction of Ragtime (1890s) and Jazz (1920s), white and black musicians of the rural South continued to play the parlor pieces and adapt them to their own regional styles. Southern musicians borrowed tunings, picking styles, and chord changes from the parlor pieces for use in the development of nascent country and blues music. Among southern rural guitarists of the 1920s, the titles of Worrall’s most popular tunes became synonymous with favored open tunings, “Vastopol” (Sebastopol) for D Major and “Spanish” (Spanish Fandango) for G Major.
Henry Worrall’s quite unintentional influence on southern rural music of the early 20th century is evident in the music of a variety of performers from Sam McGee’s “Drummer Boy” and Mississippi John Hurt’s “Spanish Fandango,” to Elizabeth Cotton’s “Sebastopol” and John Renbourn’s “Sebastopol Revisited.”
All of the materials in this collection derive from Henry Worrall's personal music collection. Some manuscripts bear a stamp that reads "H. Worrall, 807 Kansas Ave., Topeka, Kas." These materials passed to Henry's wife, Mary Elizabeth Harvey Worrall, at the time of his death in 1902. Mary subsequently presented this material to her children. A note on several of the items reads "Presented by mama the 9 of March 1903, 715 Polk St. Topeka." The children of Henry and Mary presented the material to their children in turn. Mrs. Anton W. Worrall, wife of Anton Worrall of Kansas City, MO, and grandson to Henry and Mary Worrall, donated the collection to the Kansas Historical Society on October 31, 1968. See the Henry Worrall collection for more information on these materials. Additional Worrall materials on Kansas Memory may be viewed by searching Henry Worrall.