Blue Waters Mountain Lodge

There was a man over in Cherokee County who had some mighty good luck with ‘taters.  He planted them on a steep hillside and when he dug under the row, one of the big ones rolled down the hillside and a great slew of dirt followed after.  The dirt dammed up a...

There is a story they tell about the people of Western North Carolina.  For a great many years they were considered to be the toughest of the tough, especially those mountaineers living in the vicinity they called Shelton Laurel.  They tell a tale of an old feller...

In the mountains the traditional ballads are dying out, largely through the competition of native ballads and hillbilly songs, though the folk festivals have helped revive them.  Meanwhile, folk music is still as vigorous and flourishing as when Bob Taylor’s fiddle,...

As stories with enough truth in them to make good story material and to incite the imagination to try to improve on actual happenings, yarns and tall tales belong to the borderland between fact and fantasy, shifting now to one side and now to the other.  With myth and...

This song is native to Western North Carolina.  This song was originally composed by Cascom Lamar Lunsford of Leicester, North Carolina.  It was taken over by the folk singers and spread all over the United States.  About 70 years ago Lunsford had some records made of...

The men chewed, the finicky and toothless slicing the quid from the plug with a pocket knife – no male was complete without his knife – the rest biting or gnawing it off with such teeth as they had.  Of the biters there were two kinds: the clean, whose teeth went...

Due to the passive and conservative role of women, luck signs, omens and taboos were her special prerogative, especially the “dassents,” which suggest the utility of superstition for social control, as in the discipline of children, etiquette and industry. Taboos...

For the farmer weather overshadows world history and makes local history, as it makes crops, conversation and mythology.  A drought is a menace, especially to the farmer; to a crop delayed by drought, as always in the mountains, the first killing frost is another...

The signature of plants (the doctrine that the color, shape, name, or other symbolic suggestion of a plant is a “sign” of a charm or cure for which it is effective) is no more strikingly demonstrated than in the field of love charms.  One of the most general of...