Black Shawl emanates from Kathryn Stripling Byer's fascination with
female ballad singers in southern Appalachia, whose voices haunt
the mountains still, and from the image of a black net or shawl
being dragged over the ground, plumbing the depths, collecting bits
and fragments of a woman's life. The singers and storytellers of
this splendid collection are struggling to answer the query of the
book's epigraph: ""What will you make of this?"" The first section,
""Voices,"" offers a variety of female perspectives, those of
mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers. These women are singing the
old songs and waiting for their lives to change. ""Blood
Mountain,"" the second part, experiments with ballad conventions
and the mysteries of mythmaking: "" . . . one story's good as
another so long as there's blood in it."" Delphia, a quilter and
teacher who narrates the third section of Black Shawl, epitomizes
these mountain women-the very ones who became the Keepers of the
Ballads, the repositories, and who passed down their knowledge.
Through the remarkable mountain women of Black Shawl, Byer portrays
the singers, once mute, finding their place, weaving a thread in
the web of their existence and its endlessly evolving pattern.
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