The songcatcher : a ballad novel /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Folksinger Lark McCourry is haunted by the memory of a song. As a child she heard it from her relatives in the North Carolina mountains, and she knows that the song has been in her family since 1759, when her ancestor, nine-year-old Malcolm MacQuarry, kidnapped from the Scottish island of Islay, learned it aboard an English ship. The song accompanied young Malcolm when he made his way to Morristown, New Jersey, where he apprenticed with an attorney, became a lawyer himself, and fought in the American Revolution. The song went with Malcolm in 1790, when he left his family and traveled the Wilderness Road to homestead in western North Carolina, where he remarried and raised a second family. The song, passed down through the generations, carries Malcolm's descendants through the settling of the frontier, the Civil War, the coming of the railroads, and into modern times, providing both solace in the present and a link to the past. Over the years, though, the memory of the old song has dimmed and Lark McCourry's only hope of preserving her family legacy lies in mountain wisewoman Nora Bonesteel, who talks to both the living and the dead.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Full of lore about Appalachia and early folk music, this book, read competently by James Daniels and Aasne Vigesaa, tells of contemporary singer Lark McCourry's search for a folk song once heard at a family gathering. McCrumb also interweaves the life history of Malcolm McCourry, one of Lark's maternal ancestors, who was kidnapped at age nine from the Scottish Island of Islay and who learned the song aboard an English ship in 1759. It accompanied him to Morristown, NJ, where he became a lawyer and then back to North Carolina when, after leaving his grown family, he went to homestead in the wilderness. Passed down through the generations, the song had been nearly lost when Lark began her search. The author blends the historic and contemporary threads smoothly, building suspense as the story progresses. Dispelling myths about Appalachian people as uneducated hillbillies, she populates the novel with strong, talented, well-defined characters. A mystery and crime writer, McCrumb is perhaps best known for She Walks These Hills and The Ballad of Frankie Silver, which was nominated for a SEBA award. The tape quality is excellent; recommended for all public libraries. Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Skipping back and forth in time from the 18th to the late 20th century, and drawing on her own family history, McCrumb tells two stories in her appealing new novel, one heading toward, the other returning to, the Appalachians. In the present-day sections, 83-year-old John Walker is slowly dying in the eastern Tennessee town where he has lived most of his life, while his estranged daughter, Linda Walker better known as the country singer Lark McCourry is trying to make it home before he dies. She is also trying to recollect an old song she heard once at a family gathering, a song she hopes will round out her forthcoming album. But heading home, Lark is downed in the mountains in a small plane and trapped inside it. Meanwhile, Malcolm McCourry, one of Lark's maternal ancestors, narrates the story of his life, from the day in 1751 when English seamen kidnapped him at the age of nine from the Scottish isle Islay to the close of his life in the mountains of western North Carolina. Always he carries with him a song he learned aboard ship, which is then passed down to his descendants, each one remembering it at a crucial moment. McCrumb, an award-winning crime and mystery writer, has mixed historic and contemporary plots with success in the past (notably in She Walks These Hills and other novels in her Ballad series; some characters from the Ballad series reappear here), and she does so again, letting the past inform the present and generating a good deal of suspense in a novel that is not properly a mystery. Readers may come to feel that Lark McCourry, unlike the tune-miners looking to stake a copyright claim to every mountain song they hear, is the real songcatcher, the rightful inheritor of her family's music. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Appalachian novelist McCrumb's Ballad series effectively straddles mystery and mainstream genres. The stories are suspenseful but center on character, and they reflect McCrumb's ability to create a fictive quilt from odd bits of history, song, and poetry. In this latest in the series, McCrumb follows a single ballad through seven generations of the McCourry family, beginning with Malcolm McCourry, kidnapped as a child from the Scottish Isle of Islay in 1751 and brought to the American frontier. The "songcatcher" is Lark McCourry, a contemporary country-western singer, haunted by her memory of fragments of this ballad from her childhood. Past collides with present when Lark is called home to care for her dying father, from whom she has long been estranged. McCrumb shuttles between two stories: that of the kidnapped eighteenth-century Scottish boy brought to America against his will and that of Lark, brought back home against her will. Investing surprising suspense into Lark's search for the words to the ballad and for the tune of her own life, McCrumb gives the reader intriguing characters, great insight into the landscape and folkways of the South, and rich bits of comedy (a character comments that hiking the Appalachian Trail in summer is like going mall walking). Connie Fletcher

Kirkus Book Review

Kidnapped as a child from his home in the Scottish island of Islay, Malcolm MacCourry brought three things with him to the New World: a stone from Iona, the Holy Isle, to guard against drowning; a curse that no MacCourry will love his firstborn child best; and a song. Now country singer Lark MacCourry, born Linda Walker, eldest child of Judge Jack Walker, is searching for that song, dimly remembered from her Tennessee childhood. So obsessed is Lark with the ancient ballad, which tells of a Scottish shepherdess who grapples with the ghost of a Viking princess and wins a magic stone that will give her firstborn the Sight, that even when her tiny plane crashes on a flight from California—en route to a deathbed visit with her estranged father back home—she uses the last call on her failing cell phone to beg police dispatcher Ben Hawkins to help her find it. And Ben turns to Nora Bonesteel, the village wisewoman, whose gift of the Sight can’t help her find Lark, but whose peerless knowledge of rural Tennessee culture can help Lark find her song. McCrumb’s latest in her ballad series (The Ballad of Frankie Silver, 1998, etc.) is as rich and dense as Scotch shortbread, filled with humor and surprise as it spans two continents and nearly three centuries.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Sharyn McCrumb was born in Wilmington, North Carolina on February 26, 1948. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received an M.A. in English from Virginia Tech. Her novels include the Elizabeth MacPherson series and the Ballad series. St. Dale won a 2006 Library of Virginia Award and the Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year Award. Ghost Riders won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature and the Audie Award for Best Recorded Book. She has received numerous awards for her work including the Sherwood Anderson Short Story Award, the Perry F. Kendig Award for Achievement in Literary Arts, the Chaffin Award for Southern Literature, and the Plattner Award for Short Story. In 2014, she received the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Southern Literature by North Carolina's Chowan University.

(Bowker Author Biography)