This volume contains crucial folkloristic and ethnomusicological accounts of western Slavs, which are printed for the first time. It is also a historical documentation of Polish interests in the Slavic culture from the 19th century. The volume includes 149 songs from Moravia, Czech and Slovakia, majority of which was collected directly from folk musicians; however, some of them come from the literature. The particularly interesting is the collection of 78 songs (texts without melodies) recorded in 1827 by A. Kucharski in Moravia. He was a Polish philologist and slavist who conducted some research in Slavic countries. It is not known how and when the part of Kucharski’s archive, which was believed to be lost for years, was found in Kolberg’s archive. The manuscript of Kucharski is one of the oldest concise collections of musical folklore in Moravia. It supplements Czech folklore with new, rare and original variants, some of which were not recorded by anyone after Kucharski. He collected also a set of 10 texts of Slovak songs, which is of great value for folklore studies. On the other hand, the volume contains also Czech and Slovak songs collected by Kolberg; this presents a topicality of folklore of our southern neighbors and illustrates various methods of folklore documentation used at that time. There are songs collected by Kolberg in Warsaw from wandering Slovak craftsmen as well as song noted by ear during his field research in Podhale and Tatras. This material documents at the same time the relations between Polish and Slovak folklore in the territory of ethnic borderland. Before 1857, Kolberg received texts of 15 songs from the collection of Vaclav Dunder (1817-1879), a Czech musician, columnist and translator residing in Galicia. They are a valuable example of cooperation in studying, collecting and propagating Slavic folklore by the two researchers.