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Bury Me Under theWeepingWillow Sara Carter’s Roebuck autoharp was never strung with baling wire nor carved from the heart of a gallows tree, and the flower hole cut in the cherry soundboard was not the dark blossom offered at any grave, but her eerie tremolo on laments and valley ballads, Galilee Gospel, or a freight train’s lonesome moan always carried that quavering keen, like a pain from the rim of the world. She’d hold the instrument high and strum like soothing an ailing child till she found an owl’s healing calls in the chord bars, sassafras tea and copperhead tonic, anything close by to summon good luck, but she could also blend her notes like someone knotting a noose. People said her troubled voice could mourn or scorch a wound or quench a thirst. When Pleasant wed her she was just sixteen and already lonely as a wandering ghost, with a voice so private it could shave ice. She smothered in the bosom of family and faith, the frozen air of her Clinch Mountain home, 104 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 104 but learned the moody melodies of a straying tongue and tossed her hair, black-bright as a seam of number nine coal. The dovetailed sound of clinging kin known in music circles as“blood harmony” took the country market by storm. These hillbillies, one critic wrote, are blessed, but things went wrong, then worse and worst. Their burdened accent and ghostly yodel were torn by blue eyes of a cousin named Coy. Some say God will pardon and forgive and mend, but in the later sessions you can always hear a stray ember burning through the hymns, the pitch flickering even in“Sunny Side.” Hard times, hard love, she was never the same. When she passed, her shroud was fine as courting lace, and somebody tossed in rose petals straight from a forlorn song. Please, Jesus, can we get an amen? Can music ever promise the end of pain? Beyond the brow of the graveyard’s mountain a fog the woodsmoke color of a tarnished mirror snagged on the spruces of Crow Crest Peak and on wraithy voices only the bereft can hear sent its winter misery of wildwood rain. 105 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 105 ...

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