BALLAD SWAP
In the morning I showed the house I am selling to the last person who has shown interest. To my surprise they seemed very interested. But the tension of dealing with the sale of house without any experience and with tens of thousand dollars at stake is too much for me. I like all of the people who have looked at the house and would be happy with any of them buying it, but at this point I am turning over the negotiating a price to my daughter-in-law Kathy who has had experience and isn’t daunted by selling process.
The high point of the day was the ballad swap at Zadie’s, across the French Broad River from my new Marshall apartment. At the ballad swap about ten people who have learned to sing the old traditional mountain ballads, which have sometimes come long ago from Scotland or Ireland, sing a ballad without accompaniament with no vocal training of a modulated voice at all. Many of them were taught by Sheila Kay Adams who was among them. The ballads are about romance and about murder with one bloody ballad being the story of a ship lost at sea in which the starving sailors picked by lot one person who would be killed and be eaten by the others with the person who was going to cut the person’s throat also being chosen by lot. It just happened that a beautiful maiden was the unlucky one destined to eaten and her lover, by lot, was chosen to cut her throat. It had a happy ending, which I won’t reveal, but was pretty gruesome through many plaintive verses.
I will include spatial videos (if you have Vision Pro goggles) of several of the ballads. The first one, and the easiest to follow, is by Sheila Kay Adams herself.
SHEILA KAY ADAMS, THE FARMER’S CURSED WIFE
https://share.icloud.com/photos/098zRKY6NhKP_npUtraBhmChw
LORD RANDALL
https://share.icloud.com/photos/098zRKY6NhKP_npUtraBhmChw
THE CAROLINA LADY
https://share.icloud.com/photos/087ONfcFftRTKf66DW5aCJrMA
JOHNNIE
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0a1JLjHrbaNIKPuLRbomRS0nQ
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 