The Songcatcher

The Songcatcher traces one American family from the Revolutionary War to the present by following an English ballad as it is handed down through the generations. The Songcatcher tells the story of pioneer settler Malcolm McCourry beginning in 1751, when nine-year old Malcolm was kidnapped from his home on the Scottish island of Islay and to serve aboard a sailing ship. As an adolescent Malcolm turned up in Morristown, New Jersey, where he apprenticed with an attorney, later becoming a lawyer himself. He fought with the Morris Militia in the American Revolution. In the 1790's Malcolm McCourry left his wife and children, and in the company of his daughter and her husband, he made his way down the Wilderness Road to western North Carolina, where he homesteaded, married, and raised a second family. As an old man in the Carolina back country, Malcolm sang the ballad "The Rowan Stave" to his grandson. The child grows up to be a soldier in the Civil War, and he passes the song to his nephew who sings it for the tourists in the boom-town era of the 1880's, and so on. Many writers begin their careers by writing about their own lives and families, but I wrote more than a dozen books before I ventured into family history in the course of a novel. I found Malcolm McCourry while I was doing the research for an earlier book, and I was so intrigued with him that I made him the focal point of The Songcatcher, mostly because I thought he had such an interesting life, and only incidentally because he was my four-times great-grandfather. The Rowan Stave, the ballad that is the centerpiece of this novel, is not an authentic old song. It was written for this book, because I thought that I could not find a song so obscure that no reader would be familiar with it, so I composed one. However, it is true that my family did hand down authentic folk songs from one generation to the next as part of our oral tradition. It took me a while to find this out, though. My father left the mountains for World War II and never went back, so my contact with my mountain kinfolks were limited to visits in the summer and sometimes at Christmas.