My father’s family hails from the mountains of East Tennessee. There’s even a Bledsoe County just north of Chattanooga, and if you turn over a rock in Jonesborough (home of the National Storytelling Festival, as mentioned in Chapter 3), you’re as likely to find a Bledsoe as a copperhead. Depending on the situation, they both might bite you. I’ve written six novels set in these mountains, and as part of that I’ve studied many of the same things Byron covers in this book. So when I tell you that this book is the real deal, I know whereof I speak: like Byron, I’m from so far south that, for us, sushi means “bait.” I’ve known Byron Ballard for a while now and have crossed paths with her at various events across the South. Her warmth and kindness are legendary, and I’ve experienced them firsthand. But more than that, her dedication to her home region and its people is the kind of all-encompassing championing that we need. Her determination to uncover and document the practices and beliefs of this region, her region, are, in the fullest sense of the word, invaluable.
Why do I say that? Because this is the way people survived before technology and encroaching modernity made such things, at least temporarily, unnecessary. But as we’re starting to finally learn, this artificiality that was created to enhance our quality of life may do more harm than good. We’re damn near enslaved to our devices, to food that magically appears on demand, to constant mental and emotional stimulation, to a belief that what we want is what we need. When and if all this modernity collapses, the skills, practices, and beliefs Byron describes here might be more important than we realize.
And even if that doesn’t happen, knowing how to flake your mica without going blind surely can’t hurt.
A hundred or so years ago, the folks who traveled into the mountains to find and record its music were known as “songcatchers.” In these pages, Byron refers to herself as a “spellcatcher,” acquiring and preserving the habits, rituals, and details that make this way of life so special. As I write this, I’m sitting at home practicing social distancing, and the self-sufficient ways of Byron’s book seem even more necessary and crucial.
What Byron has done here, and with her work in general, is collect, collate, and present information that might otherwise have been lost. You who are reading this book, you lucky dog, will benefit from her wisdom, insight, humor, and determination. And your job of work, if you choose to accept it, will be to pass on what you’ve learned to the next generation of seekers. In one of my favorite movies, Walter Hill’s Crossroads, bluesman Joe Seneca tells Ralph Macchio, “You got to take the music past where you found it.” That’s also the implied duty of those who embrace these roots, branches, and spirits.
Alex Bledsoe
April 2020