"Wellman,.Manly.Wade.-.John.The.Balladeer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wellman Manly Wade)

The stories of John the Balladeer are some of the best American
fantasies ever written. They were powerful influences on me
before I moved to North Carolina and met Manly; and it was in
conscious and deliberate awareness of them that I wrote Old
Nathan as my homage and memorial to my friend after his death.



Dave Drake
david-drake.com




Foreword
Manly in the Mountains



Music brought Manly to the North Carolina mountains.

Folk music—the old songs, real songs—had been an interest of
Manly's since the 1920s when he tramped the Ozarks with Vance
Randolph, the famed folklorist. He was drawn by the folk festival
that he found when he moved with his family to Chapel Hill in 1951;
became a friend of the organizer, Asheville native Bascom Lamar
Lunsford; and traveled with Lunsford to meet "the best banjo
player in the country."

That was Obray Ramsey of Madison County, high in the Smokies
where they divide North Carolina from Tennessee. It was the start
of a life-long friendship, and the genesis as well of this book: the
tales of John the Balladeer, hiking the hills of North Carolina with
his silver-strung guitar.

Manly and his wife Frances visited the mountains staying in the
Ramseys' house when they were alone and in a tourist cabin father
down on the French Broad River if they had their son or another
friend with them. By the early '60s they had a little cabin of their
own, next to the Ramseys and built in fits and starts over the years
by them and their friends.

It wasn't fancy, but it was a place to sleep and eat; and a place to
have friends in to pick and sing and pass around a bottle of liquor,
tax-paid or otherwise. That was where they were when my wife and
I visited the mountains with them and with Karl Wagner in the Fall
of 1971.

The Ramseys' house is close by the road, Highway 25-70, which
parallels the course of the French Broad River snaking through