"Manly Wade Wellman - John the balladeer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wellman Manly Wade)

Foreword xi
that name on a map. Manly blended past reality with new creations in his life as well as his writing. Many
of the songs he sang and quoted in this volume are very old; he once claimed to have written "Vandy,
Vandy" himself.
And that may be part of the magic of these stories. They were written by a man who knew and loved
the folkways he described so well that he became a part of them, weaving in his own strands and keeping
the fabric alive instead of leaving it to be displayed behind the sterile glass of a museum.
May you read them with a delight as great as that of the man who wrote them.
Dave Drake Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Introduction
Just Call Me John

There are moments in literature—very rare and very marvelous— when a writer creates a unique
character. One such moment oc-curred in 1951 when Manly Wade Wellman began to write stories
about John the Balladeer.
He had no last name, no other name: he was known only as John. Some reviewers suggested that
Wellman intended John to be a Christ figure. Manly firmly denied this, but he often hinted that there might
exist some mystic link to John the Baptist (cf. Mark 1. 2-3).
We never knew a lot about John's past. He was born in Moore County, North Carolina, and Manly
said he sort of pictured John as a young Johnny Cash. He also told us that John was a veteran of the
Korean War, and that he could hold up his end of things in a bar-room brawl. John had a profound
knowledge of Southern folklore and folksongs—as did Manly. John had a guitar strung with silver
strings, a considerable knowledge of the occult, and his native wit. He needed all three as he wandered
along the haunted ridges and valleys of the Southern Appalachians—sometimes encountering
su-pernatural evil, sometimes seeking it out.
John first appeared in the December 1951 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
but Wellman had given us foreshadowings. He sometimes liked to claim that two stories from Weird
Tales, "Sin's Doorway" (January 1946) and "Frogfather" (November 1946), were stories about John
before he got his silver-strung guitar, but usually he grouped them instead with his other regional fantasies.
Not coincidentally, following his move from New Jersey to Moore County, North Carolina after the
War, Wellman
began to make use of Southern legends and locales in his stories. When he moved to Chapel Hill in
1951, his subsequent acquaintance with folk musicians of the Carolina mountains combined with
Man-ly's lifelong interest in folklore to generate the stories of John. The transition can be seen in
Wellman's abandonment of his then-popu-lar series character, John Thunstone, an urbane occult
detective who worked the New York night-club set. Thunstone's final appearance in Weird Tales ("The
Last Grave of Lill Warran" in the May 1951 issue) finds nun in hiking gear and stomping through the
Sand Hills in search of a backwoods vampire. Seven months later John the Balladeer made his first
appearance in "O Ugly Bird!". The differ-ence was the mountains—and the music.
There hadn't been anything like the John stories at that tune, and there hasn't been since. No one but
Manly Wade Welhnan could have written these stories. Here his vivid imagination merged with authentic
Southern folklore and a heartfelt love of the South and its people. Just as J.R.R. Tolkien brilliantly
created a modern British myth cycle, so did Manly Wade Wellman give to us an imaginary world of
purely American fact, fantasy, and song.
Between 1951 and 1962 Welhnan wrote eleven stories about John, in addition to a grouping of seven
short vignettes. These were col-lected in the 1963 Arkham House volume, Who Fears the Devil?. The
original magazine versions were somewhat revised (Manly grumbled that this was done to give the
collection some semblance of a novel), and four new vignettes were added. When I first met Manly in
the summer of 1963, he gave me the grim news that he was all through writing about John. Fortunately,
this wasn't to be true. Manly loved his character too much.