American composer Edward Knight completed his song cycle Tales Not Told in 2007. The poetry, by Knight's spouse and collaborator M. J. Alexander, involves the lives of six of Knight's female ancestors, including Patience Brewster, a member of the original Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts; the Quaker activist Mary Dyer, who is considered the first American religious martyr; and Sarah Towne Cloyce, a survivor of the infamous Salem witch trials. Tales Not Told was composed specifically for the author of this dissertation.

The purpose of this document is to examine Knight's cycle from the twin perspectives of genealogy (with detailed examinations of the biographies of each of Knight's ancestors featured in Alexander's poetry) and genre (emphasizing the composer's choices of generic topoi for each of the six songs in the cycle). Such a study will be an asset to future performances of this work by assembling and codifying research into the cycle's origins with the full cooperation of the creators of the work.