Bessie Eldreth and I have been talking, on and off, for the past fifteen years. She, actually, does most of the talking and sometimes sings. I do most of the listening. We have that particular, but not entirely artificial relationship that emerges between ethnographer and subject. The topic of our conversation has been almost entirely Eldreth herself: her ninety years, her life in the North Carolina mountains, her specific experiences as a woman, her large repertoire of old songs, and her interactions with family, neighbors, and, over the past twenty-five years, with folklorists and the new audiences for singing and...

Bessie Eldreth loves to talk about her childhood. Whatever the ostensible topic or purpose of a conversation, we seem always to come around to discussion of her early memories and of her interactions with parents, grandparents, siblings, and teachers. My account of her will begin, then, at this beginning to which Eldreth so insistently directed my attention, the foundation of what I as a new listener evidently needed to know in order to understand her as she wished to be understood. Still, it is wise not be too comfortable with this apparently obvious narrative ordering. Strict chronology was not a...

During my initial stint of fieldwork I began most days by speaking with Eldreth on the telephone. As part of my greeting I regularly asked, “What have you been up to?” She just as regularly responded with a remark like “Oh, not much, I went out to the garden and picked beans and strung them and canned twenty quarts of beans this morning.” I was consistently taken aback by her response—both by what she had accomplished before I had done more than eat breakfast and because I intuitively expected her to stop after the “not much” and shift to...

Bessie Eldreth’s stories are full of reported speech. Indeed, in many instances the reported conversation and the relationship between actors therein depicted or the relation between words and actions is very much the point of the narration. Changing patterns over the course of Eldreth’s life in the kinds of conversational interaction described—especially differences in the kinds of speaking attributed to men and women—suggest how she eventually, although only late in life, became able to contest her husband’s dominance and mistreatment. At the same time, stories so constructed serve two crucial functions for Eldreth in her present interactions. They...

Bessie Eldreth tells ghost stories. More specifically, she tells stories about being haunted, of being visited—without warning or permission—by spiritual presences whose message or import she must struggle to interpret. In contrast to her ordinary stories of personal experience, which she only occasionally has an opportunity to insert into conversation (except with an endlessly receptive listener like me), these are stories people ask to hear. They are self-evidently interesting, eminently tellable. Her grandchildren begged her to terrify and delight them with these tales. She has been invited to perform them for public storytelling events along with other people...

To those with whom I have shared Eldreth’s stories, she often comes across as a tragic figure, unappreciated, trapped in a loveless marriage, struggling for subsistence and respect. Despite or perhaps even because of the hardships she has faced, however, she is also an inveterate practical joker and gleefully self-identifies as a person who loves to “go pulling jokes on people.” In order to portray her accurately, as I believe she would have herself seen, it is thus crucial to include an account of these pranks.¹ Still, her joking puts me as ethnographer in a bind. Eldreth herself clearly regards...

The very first time I spoke with Bessie Eldreth in her home, she made a point of defining herself as a singer: “My singing is my life, it is, my singing is my life.” I had, of course, been introduced to her the previous summer in Washington, D.C., as a singer, so to some extent she may simply have been solidifying our connection by confirming the importance of the practice I had told her I wanted to study. Still, such a claim is not to be taken lightly. I rapidly recognized that the role of songs and singing in her...

In the fall of 2002, while I was deeply enmeshed in the writing of this book, I called Eldreth to wish her a happy eighty-ninth birthday. She reported that “two girls from the college” were coming out to visit her on a regular basis. One plays fiddle, the other banjo, and they sing and play and learn songs from her. They had also asked her if she knew Dr. Robison—it sounded as if they must be doing an oral history of significant actors in the area—and she had obliged them with her stories about her interactions with him....