|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|||
| Themes of The Ballad
Novels: Author's Notes “My books are like Appalachian quilts,” says Sharyn McCrumb. “I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South.” The Songcatcher  modern descendant of a mountain family looks for a ballad brought to this country
by her ancestor, a Scotsman who fought in the American Revolution and homesteaded
the frontier. We follow the song from singer to singer down through the family
to the present. Thus via the song and the different family members, and the passage
of time, we get glimpses of America’s progress: the Civil War, the building of
the railroads, London’s own Cecil Sharpe ballad-collecting in North Carolina
in 1916, World War II, and so on to the present.The song is the constant, and to each succeeding generation the song will resonate with a slightly different meaning. Like a melodic version of “Roots”, The Songcatcher is really a story that happened many places: Australia, Nova Scotia, wherever the people of the British Isles settled with nothing left of home but the memories. I am chronicling the version of the story I know best: the Scots who settled the southern mountains of Appalachia. There is a kinship among all these expatriates: they are many squares of the same quilt. We are all descended from people who became strangers in a strange land. I hope that readers will pick up on the universality of the story, and not think of this book as a quaint dispatch from an alien place. It isn’t. It’s a distillation of the American experience. New York Times Notable Book
The Ballad of Frankie Silver
 his is one specific drama — a
true story of an 18 year old
mountain
girl hanged for murder in 1833 — that plays out the ancient conflict:
Flatlander
versus
Mountaineer; English versus Celt; Agrarian versus Herdsman; Town versus
Country.
It’s
all there. And guess who wins every time? Well. Watch Braveheart. Nothing has
changed much since then.
New York Times Notable Book,
Literary Guild Featured Alternate, nominee for SEBA Novel of the Year, nominee for Virginia Book of the Year The Rosewood Casket  n The Rosewood Casket, I wanted to talk about the passing of the land
from one group to another, as a preface to the modern story of farm families
losing their land to the developers in today's Appalachia. The voice of Daniel
Boone is central to the novel's message, a reminder that the land inherited by
the farm families was once taken from the Cherokee and the Shawnee.The novel begins with Cherokee wise woman Nancy Ward, in the last spring of her life, as she realizes that her people are about to lose the land that she tried so hard to preserve for them. As a reminder of that transience of ownership, in a passage in Chapter One of The Rosewood Casket, I trace the passing of the land even farther back: to a time at the end of the last Ice Age, twelve thousand years ago. Appalachia was a very different place at the end of the Ice Age, when the first humans are believed to have arrived in the mountains. The climate of that far off time was that of central Canada today, too cold to support the oaks and hickories of our modern forests. Appalachia then was a frozen land of spruce and fir tree, but it was home to a wonderful collection of creatures: mastodons, saber tooth tigers, camels, horses, sloths the size of pick up trucks, and birds of prey with wingspans of twenty five feet. The kingdom of ice that was Appalachia in 10,000 B.C. was their world, and they lost it to the first human settlers of the region, who hunted the beasts to extinction in only a few hundred years. Losing the land is an eternal process, I wanted to say. It seemed fitting to start with these early residents, as a reminder that even the Indians were once interlopers. Although the title came from a 19th century Tin Pan Alley tune “The Rosewood Casket,” for me the theme song of the book is “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Los Angeles Times Notable Book
She Walks These Hills  ourneys. Everything — including the mountains — and everyone in
the book is on a journey, and time is a state of mind, so that the wilderness
becomes an idealization, existing only in the mind of an old madman. Images of
King Lear and Don Quixote may occur to you in this context.
In She Walks These
Hills the environmental factor was the geological fact that the first journey
was the one made by the mountains themselves. The mountains of Appalachia and
the mountains of Great Britain were once joined together. The Appalachians start
in Birmingham, more or less at Red Mountain right there in the city itself, and
the mountain chain runs up through Georgia, up through South and North Carolina,
Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. I realize that
the stereotypes stop about Pittsburgh, but the mountain chain itself, not the
culture, extends through New York and New England and finally ends in Nova Scotia.
There the Appalachians stop.If you did soil samples in the Atlantic, you wouldn’t find that vein of serpentine, which is the genetic DNA of the Appalachian mountains, this green mineral that rises in Georgia, follows the chain to Nova Scotia, and quits… until it reappears in the west of Ireland. You’ve skipped the Atlantic ocean, which is recent by geological standards. The mountains of Connemara contain the same vein of serpentine as our mountains. The serpentine chain extends into through Cornwall, up through Wales into the north of England, and into Scotland, the Orkney Islands, and finally ends in the Arctic Circle. I thought that was a wonderful reinforcement of what I had felt about the migration patterns of the early settlers. Here are people who left a land they loved, often because they were forced to resettle. They come to this country, look around, and hate the crowded, flat eastern seaboard. They get in covered wagons, and they keep going west until they hit the mountains, and then they follow the valleys south-southwest down through Pennsylvania, and finally they get to a place where the ridges rise, where you can see the mountains and the trees in the distance, and it looks right, and it feels right. Like home. Like the place they left. And they were right back in the same mountains they had left behind in Britain. Los Angeles Times Notable Book
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter  his book illustrates different states of liminality, that is: a threshold;
in this case: between life and death. Everything and everyone in the novel is
caught somehow between life and death: the polluted river; the hibernating groundhog;
the stillborn child; Nora Bonesteel.Ecologically it is the opposite of Deliverance — the pristine wilderness is despoiled by civilization, instead of the other way around. I think that reminding people about past problems in the region is a good way to ensure that Appalachian residents will be vigilant in the future. A favorite saying of mine is one by the English dramatist Pinero: “I believe that the future is simply the past entered through another gate.” That often seems to be true environmentally. In The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter I wrote about the chestnut blight that wiped out the American chestnut tree in the early part of the 20th century. On my desk right now is the front page of USA Today for April 9, 2002, and the headline is: “Mystery Oak Disease May Threaten Nation’s Forests.” There is a microscopic organism in the Pacific Northwest that is killing oak trees and seems to be threatening the California redwoods as well. Phytophthora ramorum kills the northern red oak, which is the dominant hardwood of the U.S. timber industry. Plant pathologists are mystified about the origin and treatment of the disease and they are trying to keep it from spreading. The chestnut blight all over again. I hope that reminding people about past devastations will help to increase their concerns over similar situations as they arise. New York Times Notable Book
If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O  trange days have tracked us down.” The sins and sorrows of the past recur in
a small southern town to haunt its inhabitants. It is not the past that one must
reckon with, but the present. It is a look at the ideals of the Class of ’66
—
who they thought they were and who they grew up to be.New York Times Notable Book
|
|||||
| |
 |
The Ballad Novels • Words & Music Performances • Signings & Appearances • Marketplace Newsletter • Home • For Educators • Author Biography • For Book Groups • Reviews Themes • About the Author & Her Novels • Keepers of the Legends • St. Dale Press Releases & Photographs • Interviews • Contact the Author • Shopping Cart |
 |
| |
Sharyn McCrumb. All Rights Reserved. Web Site Services by Service First Webmasters, Inc. | |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
