The Songcatcher: A Ballad Novel - Paperback

by Sharyn McCrumb (Author)

The Songcatcher traces one American family from the Revolutionary War to the present by following an English ballad as it is handed down through the generations. The Songcatcher tells the story of pioneer settler Malcolm McCourry beginning in 1751, when nine-year old Malcolm was kidnapped from his home on the Scottish island of Islay and to serve aboard a sailing ship. As an adolescent Malcolm turned up in Morristown, New Jersey, where he apprenticed with an attorney, later becoming a lawyer himself. He fought with the Morris Militia in the American Revolution. In the 1790's Malcolm McCourry left his wife and children, and in the company of his daughter and her husband, he made his way down the Wilderness Road to western North Carolina, where he homesteaded, married, and raised a second family. As an old man in the Carolina back country, Malcolm sang the ballad "The Rowan Stave" to his grandson. The child grows up to be a soldier in the Civil War, and he passes the song to his nephew who sings it for the tourists in the boom-town era of the 1880's, and so on. Many writers begin their careers by writing about their own lives and families, but I wrote more than a dozen books before I ventured into family history in the course of a novel. I found Malcolm McCourry while I was doing the research for an earlier book, and I was so intrigued with him that I made him the focal point of The Songcatcher, mostly because I thought he had such an interesting life, and only incidentally because he was my four-times great-grandfather. The Rowan Stave, the ballad that is the centerpiece of this novel, is not an authentic old song. It was written for this book, because I thought that I could not find a song so obscure that no reader would be familiar with it, so I composed one. However, it is true that my family did hand down authentic folk songs from one generation to the next as part of our oral tradition. It took me a while to find this out, though. My father left the mountains for World War II and never went back, so my contact with my mountain kinfolks were limited to visits in the summer and sometimes at Christmas.

Author Biography

haryn McCrumb is an award-winning Southern writer, best known for her Appalachian "Ballad" novels, set in the North Carolina/Tennessee mountains, including the New York Times Best Sellers: The Ballad of Tom Dooley, She Walks These Hills and The Rosewood Casket. Her books are frequently used in One Community/One Book programs, most recently The Ballad of Frankie Silver by the town of Gallatin TN and Volunteer State College, and The Devil Amongst the Lawyers in Winchester VA. In April 2014, Sharyn McCrumb was awarded the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Southern Literature by North Carolina's Chowan University. Named a "Virginia Woman of History" in 2008 for Achievement in Literature, she was a guest author at the National Festival of the Book in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the White House in 2006. Her novels, studied in universities throughout the world, have been translated into eleven languages, including French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Arabic, and Italian. She has lectured on her work at Oxford University, the University of Bonn-Germany, and at the Smithsonian Institution; taught a writers workshop in Paris, and served as writer-in-residence at King College in Tennessee and at the Chautauqua Institute in western New York. St. Dale, The Canterbury Tales in a NASCAR setting, in which ordinary people on a pilgrimage in honor of racing legend Dale Earnhardt find a miracle, won a 2006 Library of Virginia Award as well as the AWA Book of the Year Award. Sharyn McCrumb's other best-selling novels include The Ballad of Frankie Silver, the story of the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina (new edition, St. Martin's Press, 2013, ) which was produced as a play in 2016 by the Parkway Playhouse in Burnsville NC. Ghost Riders, an account of the Civil War in the mountains of western North Carolina, won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature from the East Tennessee Historical Society and the Audie Award for Best Recorded Book. It was published in a new edition in March 2012 by J.F. Blair Press of Winston-Salem, NC. A theatrical version of Ghost Riders was staged in June 2014 at the Parkway Playhouse in Burnsville NC.