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Title: The Songcatcher
ISBN: 0451202503
Author:
Sharyn McCrumb
Publicate Date: 2002-04-01
Publish: 2002-04-01
List Price: $7.99
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $1.96
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $0.01
Amazon Merchant Price: $7.99
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Mysticism, Song, Mountain Lore, and Ancestral History
The Songcatcher is historical fiction based on Sharyn McCrumb's genealogy tied together by a Celtic/Gaelic ballad passed down through the generations. The mystery is really the hunt for the ballad about The Rowan Stave:
Upon the hill above the kirk at moon rise she did stand, To tend her sheep that Samhain eve, with rowan staff in hand. And where she's been and what she's seen, no living soul may know, and when she's come back home, she will be changed-oh!
The Songcatcher takes the reader from the 18th century through 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, in no specific order. Although some find the story disjointed, with too many characters and storylines, I really enjoyed meeting the ancestors of the present-day people who begin and end the novel. McCrumb's descriptions of the 18th century sailors at sea were so vivid you could taste the salt air. Knowing that these people were the predecessors of the 21st century folk gave the story continuity.
A recurring theme in The Songcatcher and McCrumb's other Appalachian books is mysticism, folklore, and superstition. A special white pebble becomes an amulet that protects Malcolm McCourry against the midwife's prediction that, "The Sea will take him." Nora Bonesteel, a 21st century Appalachian resident, has "The Sight." When someone dies, Nora already has the cake to take to the bereaved family baking in the oven. She also sees ghosts and talks to them.
The combination of mysticism, song, ancestral history, mountain lore makes The Songcatcher an enjoyable tale well-worth reading.
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2: The History of a Song
The Songcatcher tells the story of one North Carolina family and the song that it passed from one generation of the family to the next, a song that famous folk singer Lark McCourry hopes to find so that she can center her next record album around it. Malcolm McCourry, kidnapped in 1751 by English sailors at age nine and taken to sea, learned the song by hearing it on evenings during which the men sang ballads to entertain themselves and their shipmates. It was the kind of ghost story that an impressionable young boy would never forget, and McCourry brought the lyrics with him to America in 1759 when he decided that he was finished with life on the ocean.
Sharyn McCrumb looked to her own family history as inspiration for The Songcatcher. She discovered ancestor Malcolm McCourry while researching another book and framed this story around his real life experiences. McCrumb uses alternating sections within each chapter of the book to recount the events of Malcolm's life that resulted in him starting a second family in the mountains of North Carolina and the real world plight of Lark McCourry who is reluctantly returning to those same mountains to see her dying father one last time.
As the book progresses from generation to generation, it becomes obvious that Lark McCourry has much in common with her ancestors. Like them, she is basically a loner who manages to keep people at a distance and who suffers a poor relationship with her father, the kind of relationship that so many first-born McCourrys experienced over the years. But the song has survived everything that the family has experienced for more than two hundred years and it is up to Lark McCourry to make sure that her father does not take it with him to the grave.
Regular readers of Sharyn McCrumb will recognize some characters from her past "ballad novels." Sheriff Spencer Arrowood makes a relatively brief, but important, appearance in the book, and Nora Bonesteeel, an old woman who converses with the dead as easily as she does with the living, is there to help tie the McCourry generations together. Rather strangely, the book includes a side story that adds little or nothing to the main plot, a storyline involving a sheriff's deputy who manages to get his foot trapped beneath the wreckage of an old airplane that crashed into the mountain forests decades earlier. Because the book already alternates two distinct storylines, the addition of a third one into the mix, one that really doesn't go anywhere, is an unnecessary distraction.
Sharyn McCrumb has an interesting family history and, although The Songcatcher is not one of her strongest books, it is worth a look.
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3: Haunting & Lyrical
I've had this one on my bookshelf for some time and just recently, in the mood for a good story, I picked this one up. I wish I hadn't finished it. It is a tale of a people that traveled from Scotland to the USA to the Tennessee/North Carolina mountains. This book travels back and forth from 1751 to present ~~ tracing the footsteps of a lineage and a haunting ballad that has been preserved in the family over the generations.
Lark McCourry is on her way home when her plane crashed in the mountains. She is haunted by the memory of a song that she had heard as a child, a song that was brought over to the States by her ancestor, Malcom McCourry, who was kidnapped as a child off the coasts of Scotland. He eventually became a lawyer in the States, fought in the Revolutionary War, raised a family, and headed off to the Wilderness Road to North Carolina, where he raised a second family. He passed the song onto his descendants, one of whom is Lark.
Lark is a famous folksinger on her way home to seeing her dad, with whom she has a rocky relationship with and is trapped in the plane that crashed. While waiting for help, she also asked for help in relocating this ballad to preserve it.
While the song travels over the years, McCrumb writes of people who lived in different times and their little stories become enmeshed with one another in a trickle of humanness and bits that make up the world today. Those ancestors of Lark's were all unique individuals who struggle to get ahead and still have a deep abiding love for their mountains and heritage.
It is a beautiful haunting story ~~ one to keep as a reminder that there are just some things that are worth preserving, a family song, a memory and family. It's a great book ~~ and one to cherish.
8-4-06
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4: Intriguing Characters
A book with a folksong as hero? I liked the idea and soon was engrossed in McCrumb's world and intriguing characters.
The novel centers around a contemporary singer's search for a song heard years earlier at a relative's funeral. The story is told by a number of viewpoints which vary from past to present, a technique which might be distracting were not the various characters so interesting.
Chief among them is Malcolm McCourry, who is kidnapped as a child from his home on the Scottish island of Islay, becomes a lawyer in New Jersey, then, in his middle years, abandons wife, children and profession to become a pioneer in the North Carolina wilderness where he builds a new life with a common-law child-bride.
Malcolm's descendant, Linda Walker, who has re-named herself Lark McCourry and honed a career as a folksinger, is the one who seeks his song and provides the modern storyline. While returning home to the mountains to see her ailing father, her plane crashes and she uses her cell phone to contact 911. She talks the dispatcher into joining the hunt for the song and he complies as a means to occupy her mind during the rescue effort.
Based in part on McCrumb's own ancestors (Malcolm McCourry, for one), the novel combines elements of genealogy, history, mountain lore, ghosts, mystery and, of course, music. In fact, the song at the crux of the whole is actually an original composed by the author.
I have to confess this is the first of McCrumb's Ballad series I've read. But, it won't be the last.
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5: Family Story
This is a great story. It could make everyone who reads it become interested in geneology. Sharyn McCrumb at her best writing a true story from her family.
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