Living with Ballads: Sidna Allen
Rent from DeepDyve- Living with Ballads:Sidna Allen
He mounted to the bar with a pistol in his hand and he sent Judge Massie to the Promised Land:
the only mountain ballad my mother ever sang the years that she was raising me on Pop Rocks and Tang,
and Grandmother thought secular music miles beneath her notice, so my mind is not one Stith Thompson motif
after another, not a green wood thick with noble felons, no Gypsy Davies to seduce, no Barbara Allens,
just local Sidna, late in the murder song tradition, coming at you straight out of my mother's kitchen.
Ed. note: From Fire Baton, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2006, and reprinted here with the author's permission.
Elizabeth Hadaway's work has appeared in Poetry and Shenandoah and is forthcoming in Cave Wall. Her first book, Fire Baton, was published in 2006. She lives near Baltimore and is a 2007 Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.
