If Ever I Return, Pretty
Peggy-O: An Introduction
    his
attempt to make sense of the inexplicable by making up my own "legend" is
still an occasional source of inspiration to my work, most notably in the
novel If Ever I
Return, Pretty Peggy-O, which began as an attempt to answer the question: "I
wonder who lives in that house." That house is a stately white
mansion set amid stately oaks on Highway 264 on the outskirts of Wilson,
North Carolina. My parents
lived in Greenville, North Carolina, and practically the only way to reach
Greenville from points west was to take Highway 264, which meant that I had
been I had been driving past
that white mansion for nearly twenty years: home for weekends from UNC Chapel
Hill, back from my job as a newspaper reporter in Winston-Salem, and later
back from the Virginia
Blue Ridge, where my husband and I were attending graduate school at Virginia
Tech.
 In the spring of 1985 I was driving home by
myself when I passed the big white house on Highway 264, and I said for at least the two
hundredth time: "I wonder who lives in that house." I still don’t
know who really lives there: it isn’t the sort of place that invites drop-in visits
from inquisitive strangers. I decided to answer the question with my imagination.
"A woman lives in the house," I thought. "She bought the house with
her own money. She didn’t marry to get the house, and she didn’t inherit it. Who
is she?" A folksinger. She would have to have made a substantial amount of money
to be able to buy the house, but in order to take up residence in a small Southern town,
her career would have to be over.
A character began to take shape. This
folksinger had attended UNC-Chapel Hill in the Sixties, as I had. She was still
young-looking, a trim blonde woman in her early forties, who had once been a minor
celebrity in folk music, but her popularity waned with the change in musical trends, so
now she has bought the white mansion in the small Southern town, looking for a place to
write new songs, so that she can stage a musical comeback, probably in Nashville. She
doesn’t know anybody here, I thought.
 I had loved folk music when I was in college,
and I had grown up listening to my father’s mixture of Ernest Tubb and Francis Child,
so I began to consider what songs this folksinger character might have recorded. Since I
was alone in the car, I could sing my selections as I drove along. After a couple of
Peter, Paul, and Mary tunes, I happened to recall an old mountain ballad called Little
Margaret. I was reminded of it, because I had heard Kentucky poet laureate Jim Wayne
Miller sing it in a speech at Virginia Tech only a few weeks earlier. The song is a Child
Ballad. It is four centuries old, and it is a ghost story. Little Margaret sees her lover
William ride by with his new bride, and she vows to go to his house to say farewell, and
then never to see him again. When she appears like a vision in the newlyweds’ bed
chamber that night, William realizes that he still loves her, and he goes to her
father’s house, asking to see her: "Is Little Margaret in the house,
or is she in the hall?" He receives a chilling reply: "Little
Margaret’s lying in her cold, black coffin with her face turned to the
wall."
I sang that verse a few times, because some
instinct told me that the heart of my story was right there. The owner of the house is a
folksinger. She has moved to a small town, where she doesn’t know anybody, and one
day she receives a postcard in the mail, with one line printed on the back: "Is
Little Margaret in the house, or is she in the hall?" The
folksinger’s name is Margaret! The line would terrify her with its implied threat,
and she would take the message personally, because her own name was in the line. Having
sung the song many times in her career, she knows the next line: "Little
Margaret’s lying in her cold, black coffin with her face turned to the
wall." I pictured her calling the local sheriff in a panic, and saying that
someone is threatening her life, but the sheriff sees no threat in the line on the
postcard. He tells her that the message is simply a prank. I thought: Suppose something or
someone close to her is violently destroyed that night. Then she will know that the threat
was serious. Then all she can do is wait for the next postcard to come, as she and the
sheriff try to find out who is stalking her.
As I drove toward my parents’ house, I
followed the thread of the plot, so that by the time I reached Greenville, I knew who
lived in that house, (which I had mentally relocated to east Tennessee), and I had the
seeds of the first Ballad novel If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O. That hour of
inspiration was followed by several years of hard work, researching the high school
reunions of Sixties’ graduates, talking to Vietnam veterans, and interviewing law
enforcement people, but the idea itself came from an old mountain song.
The theme of If Ever I Return, Pretty
Peggy-O came from a more modern melody: the Doors’ tune Strange
Days Have Tracked Us Down. I thought: Suppose "strange days" tracked
everybody down one summer in an east Tennessee village. For the Baby Boomers
it is their 20th high school
reunion, forcing them to come to terms with their shortcomings; for the sheriff
and his deputy, it is the memory of Vietnam, which haunts them both but for
different reasons; and
for Peggy Muryan, the once-famous folksinger, strange days track her down
in the form of a stalker who still remembers her days of celebrity. For Appalachia
itself, the Strange Days
refer to the time when the traditional folkways began to be lost in the onslaught
of the modern media culture. Child ballads gave way to the Top 40; quilts
featured cartoon
character designs; and the distinctiveness of the region began to erode as
it was bombarded by outside influences. In each case "Strange Days" meant
the Sixties.
 Music is a continuous wellspring of creativity
for me. When I was writing the subsequent Appalachian Ballad novels, I would make a sound
track for each book, before I began the actual process of writing. The cassette tape,
dubbed by me from tracks of albums in my extensive collection, would contain songs that I
felt were germane to the themes of the book, and sometimes a song that I thought one of
the characters might listen to, or a "theme song" for each of the main
characters. Generally, the songs I use to focus my thinking do not appear in the novel
itself; they are solely for my benefit, although I have thought of providing a "play
list" in the epilogue to each book.
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