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Our October Front Porch Book Club Selection Is 'The Ballad of Laurel Springs'

Photo credit: Country Living
Photo credit: Country Living


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Pull up a seat as we dive in to one book each month with the Country Living Front Porch Book Club! Our Oct. 2021 selection is the Janet Beard's The Ballad of Laurel Springs.

If you loved The Atomic City Girls, then we've got a treat for you! Internationally best-selling author Janet Beard is back with the fall-dipped, folk song–steeped porch read we've been waiting for. The Ballad of Laurel Springs (available Oct. 19) follows generations of women from a Tennessee mountain family as they strive for autonomy, freedom, and safety in the wake of violence—the dark legacy of which shapes the folk songs the women inherit with each passing generation. The captivating writing will grab you from the start, and you'll spend your nights curled up with this page-turner in one hand and a cup of cider in the other. It's the perfect read to usher in fall, and we're thrilled to share this excerpt with you!

Grab a copy of The Ballad of Laurel Springs at your local independent bookstore, Amazon, or Bookshop, and start reading with us Oct. 19!

Excerpted from The Ballad of Laurel Springs

THE KNOXVILLE GIRL

CARRIE
(SARAH’S DAUGHTER)
1985-1993

I want to say that the accident of where I was born is not important to me in any fundamental way, but I know that isn’t true. I was as formed by the place where I grew up as by my parents, my genetic predispositions, or anything else, most certainly in the way I saw the world and what I knew to be my place in it. Is it like this for everyone? Probably not. Some places are more resonant than others. Or more distinctive. Or more inescapable. Not that I had any trouble escaping when the time was right. But did I really leave my Appalachian mountain home behind? Or does the old chestnut hold true: you can take the girl out of the hollow, but you can’t take the hollow out of the girl?

I can still sing the Appalachian ballads my grandmother taught me as a child. Perhaps it is to my detriment that I never had a child of my own to pass the songs down to; on the other hand, the preservation of traditional music is probably not a good enough reason to bring new life into this world. Grandma Polly knew a lot of the old songs, and she loved to sing. She lived with us until her death when I was eight and often sang to herself as she kneaded dough or worked at her sewing machine or, later, when she was too sick to do much more than just sit. Still she sang, and I loved her songs—especially the murder ballads. These seemingly cobwebbed and moth-eaten tunes told shocking stories, most often of men killing their girlfriends and dumping their bodies into rivers.

Now I’m disgusted by the endless variety of TV shows about women being murdered, repulsed by the steady stream of true-crime exposés, narrated in husky tones, shocking us, warning us, titillating us. But as a child I was fascinated by those songs. And I see how they all speak of the same thing. There will always be a few who murder, and many who want to hear about it.

“Sing ‘The Knoxville Girl’!” I’d plead to Grandma, as she idly worked on a crossword in her favorite easy chair. It was my favorite ballad, since it mentioned the city where I was born. Grandma sang loud and clear, and even though the singer is supposed to be a man, I thought the tune suited her voice:

They carried me down to Knoxville and put me in a cell,

My friends all tried to get me out but none could go my bail,

I’m here to waste my life away down in this dirty old jail,

Because I murdered that Knoxville girl, the girl I loved so well.

When she finished, the words hung in the stale air of our living room. The song was horrifying and marvelous, though I struggled to understand it.

“Why would a man kill a girl he loved?” I asked. I was very young then and didn’t yet know much about the world.

Reprinted from THE BALLAD OF LAUREL SPRINGS by Janet Beard. Copyright © 2021 by Janet Beard. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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