TAGS:<\/strong> Alice Cobb Stories The Balla Singer PMSS Notes Nov. 1935; Alice Cobb; Lige Jackson; Lolly Toodum; Little Brit; Lexine Baird; Medical Settlement at Big Laurel; Little Laurel;<\/p>\n Of ballad singers, the Pine Mountian Valley knew many. Some were more famous than others but they all shared what Evelyn K. Wells in her book The Ballad Tree <\/em>(1950) describes as a kind of poetry of folkways. where the singers live “close to the realities of existence” — Where entertainment depended on the individual’s own resources.<\/p>\n “It was moreover natural for him to sing, for the lines of the ballads slipped from his tongue like his own spoken language. What is poetry to us was his natural expression, and words which seem to us archaic, or illiterate, or poetic, were his daily speech. As his tunes belonged to the usage of a bygone day, rejected by the literate, so did his daily speech. It is of course not a new discovery that dialect was once polite speech.<\/p>\n […] The ballad’s directness of action is as familiar to the singer as its diction. For the mountaineer, a situation needs not comment, but doing. He kills his man as quickly as Lord Dannel, he acts without the law like the borderer he steals his wife from an enemy clan as gallantly as the hero of ‘The Gay Goshawk’.’ He is satirical about human frailty as any past singer of ‘The Farmer’s Curst Wife,’ and as fatalistic as Edward about those things “which will never be, be, be.”<\/p>\n And sometimes he gives a gift or takes one away as he drives home his message. The following excerpt from the bi-annual Notes\u00a0<\/em>of the Pine Mountain Settlement School sent to the friends and donors to the School, subtly explores the worlds of “insider” and “outsider.”<\/p>\n
\nGallery: ALICE COBB STORIES PMSS The Ballad Singer Notes Nov. 1935<\/h3>\n\n\t\t