The Songcatcher by Sharyn McCrumb
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Book Reviews of The Songcatcher
Book Review: Sheer pleasure to read
Summary: 4 Stars
The Songcatcher was one of those wonderful discoveries. I picked up the book to read during a meal alone while on a business trip and was capitivated. Ms. McCrumb'interweaving of the story of the song's travel to Appalachia via the travels of Malcolm McCourry family, of the search for Lark McCourry, and of Lark's search for the song was masterful. I can't wait to read another of her books.Book Review: Drove me crazy
Summary: 4 Stars
This book drove me crazy - I was always peeking at the next chapters trying to read ahead. It is a good historical novel which flip/flops chapters from old times to current times, filling in the years of the generations.Book Review: The History of a Song
Summary: 3 Stars
The Songcatcher tells the story of one North Carolina family and the song that it passed from one generation of the family to the next, a song that famous folk singer Lark McCourry hopes to find so that she can center her next record album around it. Malcolm McCourry, kidnapped in 1751 by English sailors at age nine and taken to sea, learned the song by hearing it on evenings during which the men sang ballads to entertain themselves and their shipmates. It was the kind of ghost story that an impressionable young boy would never forget, and McCourry brought the lyrics with him to America in 1759 when he decided that he was finished with life on the ocean.
Sharyn McCrumb looked to her own family history as inspiration for The Songcatcher. She discovered ancestor Malcolm McCourry while researching another book and framed this story around his real life experiences. McCrumb uses alternating sections within each chapter of the book to recount the events of Malcolm's life that resulted in him starting a second family in the mountains of North Carolina and the real world plight of Lark McCourry who is reluctantly returning to those same mountains to see her dying father one last time.
As the book progresses from generation to generation, it becomes obvious that Lark McCourry has much in common with her ancestors. Like them, she is basically a loner who manages to keep people at a distance and who suffers a poor relationship with her father, the kind of relationship that so many first-born McCourrys experienced over the years. But the song has survived everything that the family has experienced for more than two hundred years and it is up to Lark McCourry to make sure that her father does not take it with him to the grave.
Regular readers of Sharyn McCrumb will recognize some characters from her past "ballad novels." Sheriff Spencer Arrowood makes a relatively brief, but important, appearance in the book, and Nora Bonesteeel, an old woman who converses with the dead as easily as she does with the living, is there to help tie the McCourry generations together. Rather strangely, the book includes a side story that adds little or nothing to the main plot, a storyline involving a sheriff's deputy who manages to get his foot trapped beneath the wreckage of an old airplane that crashed into the mountain forests decades earlier. Because the book already alternates two distinct storylines, the addition of a third one into the mix, one that really doesn't go anywhere, is an unnecessary distraction.
Sharyn McCrumb has an interesting family history and, although The Songcatcher is not one of her strongest books, it is worth a look.
Book Review: Good read, but not the best intro to McCrumb
Summary: 3 Stars
McCrumb's newest paperback is a ramblin' book. Its chapters form a mountain switchback. The odd chapters tell an episodic story set in the present, about rising country singer Lark McCourry , her difficult father, and her attempt to track down an old ballad about a graveyard and a rowan stave, of which she can remember only the one-line chorus: "And when she comes back, she will be changed-oh." The even chapters trace the progress of the song from Scotland in the mid-1700s to the present, through a long line of Lark's ancestors (each of whom, as it happens, is one of Sharyn McCrumb's real ancestors.)"The Songcatcher" affords many small pleasures and no sweeping ones. There's the local southern Appalachian color, and McCrumb's evident pride in it, particularly the constant sprinkling of unexpected hill country expressions (I liked "poor as Job's turkey", and I am not likely soon to forget the significance of Matthew 23:25). There are numerous interesting characters, though I felt only Malcolm McCourry, the founder of the line, was fully drawn and rounded. The ballad itself, which McCrumb wrote for the book, is as haunting and authentically folkwise as anything in Childe, and I wish the music came with it. What seemed to be missing was any deep passion, or any strong narrative drive. I was always happy to be reading along, but never dying to know what would happen next.
For members of McCrumb's extended family, this volume is bound to seem a treasure trove. The same may be true for those who have ever been bitten (as I never have) by the genealogy bug; and for those who have read enough of her previous novels to feel, as one might easily come to feel, that the author is an old friend. For the rest of us, this is a pleasant enough read, but probably the wrong place to start in on her works. Several of her previous Appalachian sagas have all the strengths of this one, and none of its weaknesses, and stand better on their own. The earlier books will also introduce you to a number of the local constabulary and eccentrics, with whose lives and habits this volume seems to assume you are already familiar.
Book Review: Appalachian Roots
Summary: 3 Stars
Sometimes an author gets so bound up in a subject that is tangential to the plot, she neglects to tell a coherent story. I'm afraid Sharyn McCrumb has to plead guilty to this writerly sin in "The Songcatcher." She seems to have become so fascinated by her search for her own ancestors that she incorporated large chunks of their history into this book (see "The Songcatcher's" Afterward), with only a slight bow to plot relevance. While her ancestors are fascinating and would hold my interest for an extended e-mail conversation, they do clutter up this novel's story. Ostensibly the author uses flashbacks to show the origin of "The Rowan Staff," an ancient ballad that was passed down through generations of the McCourry family, beginning with the boy Malcom who was abducted from the Scottish island of Islay and brought to pre-Revolutionary America. He becomes a lawyer, fights the Revolution, and emigrates to the southern Appalachian Mountains. His progeny remain in the highlands of North Carolina and Tennessee, fight in the Civil War, World War II, and work the ancestral farm or become lawyers, all the while singing "The Rowan Staff."
You might think this sounds like a pretty straight story line from the 1760s to the current millennium, even though the characters change, but McCrumb chooses to portray the lives of her ancestors in vignettes that are interspersed with the modern-day saga of a folksinger who is searching for an old song.
Actually there are two folksingers who want to record "The Rowan Staff," two plane wrecks, two characters who are lost in the mountains, two ghosts, and two old folks who have the Sight. My favorite character, Miss Nora Bonesteel, who is one of the Seers and who has shown up in previous McCrumb novels, almost gets lost in the shuffle of multiple viewpoints and the back-and-forth zap of the timeline.
McCrumb is a good writer and has a great ear for dialogue, but this story tries to play too many songs at once.