Checking out releases in music and literature Graphic: Sculpture, "Aviary" by Robert E. Kuhn, Blue Ridge Mountains, VA Everything You Want CD Review by Don Silvius What's this? Another Washington, DC-area band? Vertical Horizon had its beginnings in Georgetown in the early 1990's. After paying their dues on the road and attracting major label attention, they were signed to RCA Records. "Everything You Want" is their RCA debut. Band personnel are; Matt Scannell: vocals, guitars, keyboards; Keith Kane: vocals, guitars; Sean Hurley: bass; Ed Toth: drums and percussion. Vertical Horizon is more proof that the best music doesn't necessarily get played on the radio. The disc if full of tunes in a "pseudo-alternative" style, at times reminiscent of seventies mainstream rock. "We Are" opens the disc - a catchy, made for radio tune that gets your attention right away, it has gotten airplay on the Washington, DC area stations. "You're a God" is very rhythmic with great vocal harmonies. It is one of those songs that once it gets in your head, you can't get rid of it - and it's a great dance song if that's what you're looking for. A nice acoustic beginning leads in to the harmony-laden "Everything You Want", while a "crying" guitar begins "Best I Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning)", an incredibly smooth song that is my personal favorite on the disc, and this was not an easy decision to make. "You Say" is another driving tune with great vocal harmonies and a catchy hook that won't go away! "Finding Me" is a rhythmic song that displays the vocal abilities of Matt Scannell and Keith Kane - and the guitars sound great! "Miracle" is a flowing, melodic tune with nice vocal harmonies. "Send It Up" is again highlighted by the harmonies and a nice guitar lead that doesn't override the rest of the song. "Give You Back" is a good ballad with a driving chorus. "All of You" is rhythmic and driving and will get you on your feet. "Shackled" has a bluesy intro that leads to a driving tune that, again, is melodic and harmony-filled with nice guitar solos. Vertical Horizon is a band worth hearing. The songwriting is strong, as are the vocal harmonies and the musicianship. Good musicians make good music - Vertical Horizon is proof of that. If you want to compare them to a band with a track record, REM would be a good comparison. They are already popular on college campuses, and many other bands got their start this way - to name just one - REM. If you are going to buy a CD you haven't heard before, this is the one to buy. You will not be disappointed. Find out more about Vertical Horizon at their website. Music Books Enter keywords... Find this CD and others, or a book using AMAZON.COM's search engine or CDNOW Movie Title Actor or Actress Search for a MOVIE using CDNOW's FastFind Check out all the CDNOW MOVIES available Die With It In You, Frankie An Interview With Sharyn McCrumb (c.) by Scott Nicholson Scott Nicholson is a fiction writer living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. His story collection Thank You For The Flowers will be released in 2000 by Parkway Publishers. He writes for the Mountain Times in Boone NC, and operates a writer's website at http://users.boone.net/nicholson. graphic: People of The Grid III, sculpture by Margaret Gregg, Mill 'N Creek Studio Gallery, Limestone, TN Sharyn McCrumb's most recent novel, The Ballad of Frankie Silver, is the fifth in her "Appalachian Ballad" series. In the following interview, she talks about her interest in Appalachian culture and history, her relationship to the Silver family, and her next book. Q: Why the idea of Frankie Silver? Sharyn McCrumb: Because I wanted to look at two things: equal justice under the law, whether rich people as officers of the court and poor people as defendants makes for a just resolution to a case; and number two, the case that showed the differences between the two Souths, the mountain South and the flatland South, which are two cultures of very separate traditions. Frankie was the mountain South, a frontier girl living in a log cabin in what is now Mitchell County. Back in 1832, when she was arrested, Burke County went all the way to the Tennessee line. The county seat, then as now, was Morganton. So when Frankie was arrested near Bakersville and taken forty miles down the mountain and eastward to Morganton, she crosses that invisible line from one culture to another. She goes from the mountain South to the flatland South, where she becomes a woman of no importance. She has no money, no family connections with the aristocracy, no political pull. Q: Do you think there's a stereotype that "flatlanders" or others might have of mountain people? McCrumb: Certainly. There's a great misunderstanding. Here's one small example. It seems to me that in the English South, they have an interlacing system of benevolences, that you take care in the aristocracy to make sure that everyone you know owes you a little favor all the time. You give dinner parties, they give dinner parties. You give my daughter a summer job, I'll get your son into West Point. It's this little give-and-take all the time. Mountain people don't work like that. Mountain people don't take charity, and if you do them a favor they'll lie awake nights thinking up ways to pay you back. It's a different take on the world. Q: Obviously you spent a great deal of time here doing research. McCrumb: In the archives of the Appalachian Collection (in Boone, N.C.) for about a week, with Dean Williams, who is librarian there. But all the census records, and all the genealogy that I needed, and Who's Who in North Carolina, the really good North Carolina reference books are here in Boone. Q: I understand your great-grandfathers had connections here as traveling preachers. McCrumb: Yes, but back before that, my first ancestor to come to Mitchell County was kidnapped as a child off the west coast of Scotland and was made to serve as a cabin boy on a sailing ship. This was in the late 1750's. Then he ended up in Morristown, New Jersey, as a young man. He read law, practiced law, fought in the American Revolution, and after the war was over in the 1790's, he comes down that Wilderness Road with the other settlers and reaches Mitchell County. He homesteaded there on a little farm that's still in the family. His name was Malcolm McCory. My family has been in Mitchell County since 1794. The other side of the family is the Honeycutts, and it's through them that I'm related to Frankie Silver. One of the Honeycutts married one of the Howells, and Frankie's brother married into the Howell family. Q: Did you discover that case and decide to write the book, or was it something you stumbled over in your research? McCrumb: You know when you're about five and all your information comes from eavesdropping? I'd heard about Frankie Silver, but I wasn't interested, because in my head she looked like Granny Clampitt of the Beverly Hillbillies. Then when I did research for She Walks These Hills, I discovered she was 18. So maybe when I was five I thought that was what 18 looked like. Not only that, what made it not go away was that I was in Mitchell County researching the landscape, and two Yancey County authors were driving me around, and we still had daylight left. So they said, "Get back in the car, we want to show you something." And they took me up to the top of the mountain along State Route 80, and there was a little white church and the Kona cemetery, the Silver family cemetery. And they showed me these three uncarved graves off by themselves, and said, "Charlie Silver's buried here." And I said, "Ooh, which grave?" and they said, "All of them." How could you not write this story? For the first time, I got some control over the book cover, and I gave the publisher a list of photographers' names from this area, and they picked Ken Murray of Kingsport. We drove over the mountain, and it was raining that October day, and he lay down in the mud and took a picture with me holding an umbrella over his head. That's the picture on the cover. Q: Is there a strong storytelling tradition in your family? McCrumb: I think so. First of all because of that Scots-Irish tradition. The whole culture was handed down in the oral tradition. It's a tribe devoted to storytelling. Then you have the circuit preachers, who were the great-grandfathers. Then my grandfather taught school for awhile, and my father was a college professor. So we've been making a living with our mouths for generations. Q: You seem to have a real passion for research and finding out how things worked. Is it important to you to get it right? McCrumb: In general, I look at the past, because I think a lot of problems people had in the past come back in another form. People losing the land, for example. In The Rosewood Casket, I show a farm family about to sell the land to a developer because Daddy's dying. Then you go back and look and you see Daniel Boone losing the land, the Cherokees losing the land, and people are faced with the same problem, even if it gets a little more technological and modern as we go along. In Frankie's case, I wanted to know what happened just out of curiosity because she wasn't allowed to testify at the trial. This was because defendants weren't allowed to testify under English Common Law, which is what we had until 1861. So she hadn't been allowed to tell her side of it. There was a strong presumption of self-defense, that they were hanging this 18-year-old girl who was protecting herself and her child. When Charlie Silver died, Frankie's father was in Kentucky on a hunt. They left way before Charlie disappeared, and didn't come back until Frankie was already in jail. But her father was there the day of the hanging. They took her up on the hill on July 12th, 1833, her hair cut short like a boy's, in a cart with a rope around her neck. They asked her if she had any last words. Last chance, hadn't been allowed to talk at the trial. You're supposed to have last words in 1833, because if you repent, you could save your soul. So she stepped forward and started to speak. Her father was in the crowd. He'd brought a wagon to take the body home. When she starts to speak, he yelled out, "Die with it in you, Frankie." And she stepped back and was hanged without saying a word. But Daddy was nowhere near Kona when Charlie Silver died, so what did he want her not to say? And I was afraid if I changed anything, it would get in the way of me finding out. So I had to keep everything exactly as it was. Q: There's seems to be a theme, in that and the Fate Harkryder case, of family closeness. Was that intentional? McCrumb: I invented the Harkryders, so they have to do what I want. That was the hardest thing about this book. When you're dealing with fictional characters, as a rule, they will behave sensibly because you get to tell them what to do. And the people in 1832 just did any darned thing they pleased. And I had to sit there and make it seem sensible. With the Harkryders, I wanted some thread of commonality between Frankie's case and Fate's case. And of course it was the family closeness and the "die with it in you." Q: What's up next? Are you going to continue with the Ballad series? McCrumb: I just signed a two-book contract. You would really never run out of things to say about the mountains. I have folders where I put articles, songs, and things that interest me just in case. I never know which will be the catalyst for a book. I want to do ballad collecting next. It's almost like "How The Irish Saved Civilization, Part Two: Us," because the ballads were lost in England. They forgot the ballads. They were singing music hall songs. The only place in the world where those traditional songs still existed by the 20th Century was right here, and all that folk music you heard in the '60's wouldn't have been sung. One of the things I want to do with that book-- the whole rest of it is fuzz right now-- but you know that ancestor of mine who was kidnapped as a child and forced to become a cabin boy? I want to start with him as a child on that ship learning a song. Then we see him as an old man in Mitchell County singing that song to a grandchild. And I want to follow that song in little vignettes interspersed through the book to the present. Books Music Enter keywords... Find The Ballad of Frankie Silver by Sharyn McCrumb, and other reviews, books and CDs, with AMAZON.COM's search engine I'M YOUR MAN by Leonard Cohen (Album: "I'm Your Man") If you want a lover I'll do anything you ask me to And if you want another kind of love I'll wear a mask for you If you want a partner Take my hand Or if you want to strike me down in anger Here I stand I'm your man If you want a boxer I will step into the ring for you And if you want a doctor I'll examine every inch of you If you want a driver Climb inside Or if you want to take me for a ride You know you can I'm your man Ah, the moon's too bright The chain's too tight The beast won't go to sleep I've been running through these promises to you That I made and I could not keep Ah but a man never got a woman back Not by begging on his knees Or I'd crawl to you baby And I'd fall at your feet And I'd howl at your beauty Like a dog in heat And I'd claw at your heart And I'd tear at your sheet I'd say please, please I'm your man And if you've got to sleep A moment on the road I will steer for you And if you want to work the street alone I'll disappear for you If you want a father for your child Or only want to walk with me a while Across the sand I'm your man If you want a lover I'll do anything you ask me to And if you want another kind of love I'll wear a mask for you Search for a CD using FastFind by Artist Album Title Song Title Go to the CDNow section on Rock/Pop ~ Jazz/Blues ~ World/New Age Urban/Electronic ~ Country/Folk ~ Classical Both CDNOW and AMAZON.COM maintain immense inventories, reviews, and popular selections with prices, including shipping and handling, frequently below area stores. Purchases are delivered in most cases within a few days either to yourself or as gifts for friends and family. If you buy through Rural Review, a commission percentage of your order returns to A Country Rag. Table of Contents Word Preserve Original material © A Country Rag, Jonesborough, TN, April, 1996. All rights reserved.