Bridges Over and Bedrock Beneath: The Role of Ballads in Sharyn McCrumb's Ballad Novels

In an earlier life, McCrumb must have been a balladeer, singing of restless spirits, starcrossed lovers ...1 The idea for this article came to me as I sat one day, sipping Irish breakfast tea brewed with my grandmother's teapot, battered tea-ball, and recipe, "strong enough to float a dead rat and dark enough so you don't see the rat," and rereading Sharyn McCrumb's ballad novels. I found myself meditating on the homely items, the common goods, in that "storehouse of cultural assumptions" that forge a link to who we were, and who we are, and who we yet may be (Tompkins xvi). The epigraph from the Washington Post caught my attention and I wondered how and why McCrumb uses so many ballads. Certainly ballads, both folk and contemporary, play an important role, but while it is easy to come to that conclusion, it is harder than I expected to find an explanation that transcends trite. McCrumb's most recent series is always referred to as "the ballad novels," but this phrase is little more than a handy cultural shorthand, which labels without illuminating.2 Certainly, for her audience, it is a handy signifier, one I use myself, as in, "I wish McCrumb's latest ballad novel would hit the shelves," but in and of itself, it has no more significance than a general desire to read another book by a favored author. What I found myself contemplating is the often elusive connection between McCrumb's storytelling and the ballads. While McCrumb often speaks about her interest in ballads and how they work in her novels, the connection is by no means a straightforward one. In the "Author's Note" to Pretty Peggy-O, she notes, "Generally the songs I use to focus my thinking do not appear in the novel itself" (xii). The title of If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O, for example, is from the refrain of the traditional ballad "Fennario," but the novel does not reflect the events of that ballad except in the most peripheral manner.3 "She Walks These Hills" is not only the title but also a central and recurring motif in the novel of the same name; nowhere, however, does the "Long Black Veil" appear in the novel, nor does the ballad narrative directly reflect the novel's plot.4 And yet, however elusive and indirect, the ballads have a strong and constant presence. McCrumb's ballad series is deliberately set in Appalachia, the repository of American folk tradition, in which traditional ballads are still embedded in memory, a place where her ancestors have lived for centuries, she chooses to live, and storytelling flourishes. In the novels themselves, and in her interviews, forewords, and introductions, McCrumb makes her mission perfectly clear: she is a mountain Celt and fiercely proud of her heritage, which includes a strong musical tradition. One of the reasons her popularity pleases her is that her work combats the stereotypical views of Appalachia as a backwoods, one in which the Dukes of Hazzard is reality TV, with a counterbalance of "the real character of the region, and particularly about the history and origins of Appalachia and its people ... I am passing along the songs [and] the stories ... to people who do not have a chance to acquire such things from heritage or residence (Pretty Peggy-O, xiv). One of the motifs embedded in The Songcatcher concerns the transmission of ballads, who-if indeed, anyone-"owns" these ballads, and why it is important to carry on the ballad tradition. In The Songcatcher, Nora Bonesteel tells Bonnie Wolfe, the revenant who claims "The Rowan on the Grave" as her family's property, "A song like that belongs to everybody. Not just to you or your family. That song was left to all of us, and I reckon it's up to the living to keep it going" (McCrumb, Songcatcher 248). Here the linkage between past and present is clear and centered on a ballad. Nora Bonesteel, in many ways the embodiment of the Appalachians, a mountain Celt to her bones, makes the connection apparent. Ballads are a part of both the past and the present, and, like many other old traditions Nora preserves, important to her identity as an Appalachian. …