Quite a number of places and people have laid claim to this story but they say it did take place here in Graham County, where a man who was out with his yoke of oxen and one of his oxen got sullen and laid down and wouldn’t pull. The man was in a rough place and the load required a pretty good pull. He just had the one ox to pull, so he just took the yoke off the ox’s neck and got in himself – put his head through the yoke and he with the good ox pulled the wagon out.
After they pulled out of the hole, the ox kept going faster and faster. He kept going and after a while he struck a trot and then from a trot, he put into a lope. And he kept going and finally ran towards home. The ox ran over a bee bench, started the bees to flying all over, stinging chickens. Went on and hit the shed, knocked the shed down, and a lot of stuff in the shed loft dumped into the porch. And as he passed theporch of the house, he hollered to the folks on the porch, “Here we come! Head us! Damn our fool souls!”
Back of the old fiddle tune, “The Belled Buzzard”, is a tradition which had its origins in the mountains. The story concerns a settlement along a river bottom. One bank of the river was bordered for miles by high un-scalable bluffs crowned with scrub timber, the home and breeding place of thousands of buzzards.
Hog raising was a source of income of the area. Mast from the acorn bearing trees furnished food for the droves of hogs earmarked and turned into the woods each year, to be rounded up n the fall ready for market.
One summer hog cholera broke out among the porkers. The buzzards, feasting on the dead carcasses, carried disease from one section of the county to another. There was an unwritten law that these birds should not be killed, but the farmers were aware that, unless some action was taken to check the spread of the disease, their hogs, together with their income would be wiped out entirely.
A meeting was called. It was decided to capture one of the birds and fasten a small sheep bell to it, in the hope that it would cause them to leave. One of the birds was accordingly trapped and belled. His arrival among the others created a great commotion and in a few days the flock of buzzards disappeared, only the belled buzzard remaining. Finally he, too, took flight.
At the end of the summer there was an epidemic of typhoid fever in the area, many dying. About this time the belled buzzard reappeared, the tinkle of his bell being plainly heard as he soared about the farms. He came and went time after time and always following his reappearance some sort of calamity happened. The return of the belled bird aroused apprehension in the minds of the more superstitious and his presence became associated with their misfortunes. They believed the repulsive fowl was possessed of an evil spirit. Many believe he still roams the skies, as belled buzzard casts a spell of gloom over them.
The tune “The Belled Buzzard” has been handed down through the years with this tradition, the plucking of the fiddle string in certain places in the music representing the tinkle of his bell!
The notion of the South as a “family affair” is the key to Southern loyalties. Both the Southernism and the Southerness of the South reflect the “clan-virtues” (and their defects) of the old frontier and rural folkways – folkways that were first of all American and then Southern. But in so far as these folkways have had a longer and stronger hold on them, Southerners are prone to look upon themselves as Southerners and then as citizens of the United States, this is most definitely the case in Western North Carolina.
“You can get a Southerner out of the South, but you can’t get the South out of a Southerner”- Old Saying
In a society which measured wealth in terms of land, primary emphasis was placed on personal qualities and personal relationships. These together with family connections, continue to dominate Southern business and politics. Hence, too, personal religion and the ethical code of honor.
Of all personal ties family ties are the strongest. The Southerner looking back on his childhood sees it as all “entangles with the past,” with the loves, the loyalties, the heartaches and the simple good time of a big family. As the children of the Old South scattered over the region, the home place and home folks still served as a symbol if not a bond of unity. Someone is always keeping the home place, someone is always there, and no matter how seldom or unexpectedly we may come in, we know someone will rise to give our welcome. This feeling of homewardness and at-home-ness gives a comforting sense of security and stability in time as well as place, a living sense of the long continuity of human life, an awareness of the past as living in the present and almost as real as the present. And the identification of the individual with a long line of kinfolks and their achievements gives a sense of personal participation in the history and tradition.
Along with the satisfaction of personal participation goes the responsibility of noblesse oblige, the obligation of carrying on a tradition of techniques and attitudes handed down from the fathers to the sons.
In the folkways of Southern gastronomy, eating and drinking have played a part not only in general hospitality and sociability but also in community gatherings where the needs of work, religion and politics as well as gregariousness are satisfied. Such was the case in harvest suppers, corn shucking, butchering day dinners, and all day singing and dinner on the grounds, church picnics, barbeques and fish muddles. And when the eating was light, as at frolics and dances, the drinking was apt to be heavy.
The jug and the bottle were already firmly established in the backwoods pattern where poor roads made the jug (without benefit of government excise tax) the easiest way to get corn out of corn-patches (especially in the mountains). Where money was scarce, whisky also was used for barter.
Quite a number of places and people have laid claim to this story but they say it did take place here in Graham County, where a man who was out with his yoke of oxen and one of his oxen got sullen and laid down and wouldn’t pull. The man was in a rough place and the load required a pretty good pull. He just had the one ox to pull, so he just took the yoke off the ox’s neck and got in himself – put his head through the yoke and he with the good ox pulled the wagon out.
