Distilling Mountain Ballads

The inspiration for the book I’ve been working on came from my homecoming to western North Carolina. The storytelling culture and traditional music of the region has always enchanted me, and I wanted to celebrate some of what captivates me about it in the form of an artist book. I’m drawing on the imagery and lyrics of old Appalachian ballads, and rather than picking a single story to focus on, I decided to pull from many different ones to give a more general impression of the tone and subject matter they typically contain. I spent some time in the North Carolina room at the Asheville library, studying, among others, Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Songs From the Southern Appalachians (1932), and Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882 -1898).

There are certain motifs that became apparent as I read the lyrics, and I started to make note of them: lily-white hands, the keen and sharp penknife, pretty/fair/tender maidens either courted or done wrong, the oft-repeated request to “make up my bed” in preparation to die of grief, and so on. There's love, misfortune, betrayal, and violence aplenty in these stories, usually recounted in a hauntingly matter-of-fact way. I've been translating much of this into visual form using paint and ink on handmade paper, and I’m now working out how to intersperse snippets of text on the pages. I hope the result will be a sort of distillate of these songs as captured through the filter of my own fascination with the folklore of this area I call home.