They agreed when they graduated that they would have a reunion ten years later, but they decided that only the unmarried women could come to the reunion, because the married ones would by definition be boring. And I'm not sure that that is our view of nineteenth-century Southern womanhood. I was very interested in reading letters to their husbands from women who'd been left at home to handle the family farm. By about half way through the war, those same women were informing their husbands that decisions had been made. So it was a kind of process of self-mastery that I think is always a very helpful thing to observe.
Music plays a very large role in the book.
I began collecting this music when I first started working on the book, and when I could find something that would be, say, an old man in 1920 recording an old ballad or banjo tune or whatever, I felt like I was getting about as direct access to a piece of that old southern Appalachian culture of the nineteenth century as I was going to get. Yeah, that kind of music is more and more accessible. There are some wonderful re-issues. Small recording companies have done a wonderful job of keeping that music alive. And in many cases this stuff may exist only on one or two scratchy old records.