Posts Tagged ‘Sharyn McCrumb’
Old Folktales Die Hard
By Brian Sewell “Murdered in May of 1865,” a white gravestone on the banks of the Yadkin River in Wilkes County, N.C., reads. “Tom Dula hanged for crime.” The grave belongs to Laura Foster, the victim in one of the most popularized and retold murder cases in Appalachian folk history. Like a game of cultural…
Read MoreWriting the Ballad Novels: Sharyn McCrumb In Her Own Words
My father’s family settled the North Carolina mountains in the 1790s, and I grew up in a swirl of tales: mountain legends, ballads and scraps of Appalachian history. My first ancestor to settle in these mountains was Malcolm McCourry, chronicled in my novel The Songcatcher. As a child in 1751 he was kidnapped from a…
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