Bound for Shady Grove (review)

Book Reviews199 Boundfor Shady Grove by Steven Harvey The University of Georgia Press, 2000 157 pages, cloth, $24.95 This collection of essays about the South and its music is weU crafted, lyrical , written by a keen observer of humankind. Steven Harvey clearly loves the Appalachians, the people and the music. One reviewer has said that Harvey "writes what's on his mind, but what's on his mind always seems to lead to somewhere else." I couldn't agree more. Yet there are times when where we start out is, itself, just fine. Harvey uses the seven modes of the diatonic scale—Ionian, Mixlyodian, Dorian, AcoUan, Phrygian, Lydian, and Locrian—to hold the essays together. Each section is prefaced by an explanation ofthe emotional constructs ofits associated scale. It seemed to me that this organization was more intrusive than organic—that it was distracting in an otherwise strong coUection of essays. Some of the best essays in Boundfor Shady Grove are "The Big Scioty," which is a very fine fiddle tune, and"Mountain Minor," which concerns the making and playing of an old time banjo. As someone professionaUy involved in the folk music scene, these are matters in which I have an interest , and they are also less subject to digression than some ofthe other works. In "Mountain Minor" Harvey writes, "With a banjo we are never more than a note away from woe." Happiness is fleeting, and reminders ofmortality are everywhere in the hard-fought lives of the Appalachian people. Harvey writes about songs that sing of murder, revenge, rebeUion, and retribution. The everyday matters of ordinary folk. Ifwe are but a note away from desperation and despair, we are also but a note away from its opposite: "... we lay our burden down when we kneel at the bank of a song," writes Harvey in "Dulcet Melodies." For a reader unfamiUar with the Ufe and culture of the Southern mountains , these essays paint a vivid and accurate picture. Harvey has a talent for sketching characters, from friends who bring him road kfll on a too-frequent basis (for instrument making, not eating), to boys buying guns, he creates pictures one does not soon forget. Enjoyable, too, are the snippets ofsong lyrics that pop up throughout the book. For me, they were old friends not recendy heard from. The title of the book comes from a great traditional banjo tune, with lyrics that change from region to region, and musician to musician. A 200Fourth Genre favorite version I learned twenty or so years ago fromJean Ritchie was sadly not in the book: "Wish I had a big black horse/Corn to feed him on/Pretty Uttle man to stay at home/Feed him when I'm gone . . . /Bound for Shady Grove." Throughout Boundfor Shady Grove Harvey aUows us to see that music offers more than a way to express our sorrow—it offers consolation and joy. Reviewed by Ruby Hoy A Stranger's Neighborhood by Donald Morrill Duquesne University Press, 1999 250 pages, cloth, $24.95; paper $16.95 Most travel literature aims toward an exploration ofplace, oflandscape and landmark, ofculture and human encounter. Ifjourneys ultimately begin and end with the self, however, as they do in Donald MorriU's A Stranger's Neighborhood—a book whose essays navigate the terrain not only of place, but of childhood, relationships, and emotion—the act of travel marks the traveler sooner than he can trace the wiggly lines on his map. Morrfll notes in "Shoes at Giverny" that "[t]he shoes of the travel writer are not those of the traveler, since travel literature is, ultimately, more about literature than travel." MorriU's book, in this sense, represents the best of travel narratives. It not only maps the places and people he has known, but it maps identity; it explores how the places we run from, and the places we run to, come to Ue at the core of who we are. MorriU's own travels spawned, he teUs us, from a compulsion to escape his place oforigin—Des Moines, Iowa—but they inevitably lead back to his familial terrain, to the most personal, sensitive landmarks ofhis experience. In his recountings...