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The Songcatcher traces one American family from the Revolutionary War to the present by following an English ballad as it is handed down through the generations. The Songcatcher tells the story of pioneer settler Malcolm McCourry beginning in 1751, when nine-year old Malcolm was kidnapped from his home on the Scottish island of Islay and to serve aboard a sailing ship. As an adolescent Malcolm turned up in Morristown, New Jersey, where he apprenticed with an attorney, later becoming a lawyer himself. He fought with the Morris Militia in the American Revolution. In the 1790's Malcolm McCourry left his wife and children, and in the company of his daughter and her husband, he made his way down the Wilderness Road to western North Carolina, where he homesteaded, married, and raised a second family. As an old man in the Carolina back country, Malcolm sang the ballad "The Rowan Stave" to his grandson. The child grows up to be a soldier in the Civil War, and he passes the song to his nephew who sings it for the tourists in the boom-town era of the 1880's, and so on. Many writers begin their careers by writing about their own lives and families, but I wrote more than a dozen books before I ventured into family history in the course of a novel. I found Malcolm McCourry while I was doing the research for an earlier book, and I was so intrigued with him that I made him the focal point of The Songcatcher, mostly because I thought he had such an interesting life, and only incidentally bec

The Songcatcher: A Ballad Novel, Paperback/Sharyn McCrumb

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