American Folk Music, U.S. Authors - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Biography

Bound for Shady Grove

Name: Bound for Shady Grove
Author: Harvey
ISBN: 9780820321974

by Harvey

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Overview

In Bound for Shady Grove, essayist Steven Harvey celebrates the spirit of the music of his adopted home in the southern Appalachian mountains. There, at the wellspring of mountain music, he took up his guitar and assumed the journey that culminated in this book.

Harvey's essays measure out in words the four seasons of a life in music. Springtime pieces describe playing music in the log house of friends born and raised in the mountains or entering a banjo contest and losing with style. There are essays about fiddles and the devil, homemade instruments and homemade weapons, and a trip to England to trace mountain songs back to their elusive sources. As the book progresses into winter, the mood darkens, with pieces exploring the connection between music and resentment, loss, and death.

Descriptions of music, hills, and people blend into a rich harmony as Harvey explores where music has taken him--where, in fact, music can take any of us.

Synopsis

Descriptions of music, hills, and people blend into a rich harmony as Harvey explores where music has taken him--where, in fact, music can take any of us.

Internet Book Watch

Bound For Shady Grove is Steven Harvey's celebration of the music arising from the southern Appalachian mountain communities. Harvey's essays derive from the four seasons of a life in music. The early pieces describe playing music in the log house of friends born and raised in the mountains, or entering a banjo contest and losing with style. Then there are his essays about fiddles and the devil, homemade instruments and homemade weapons, a trip to England to trace mountain songs back to their elusive sources. As Bound For Shady Grover progresses, the mood darkens, with essays exploring the connection between music and resentment, loss, and death. Harvey's explorations showcase descriptions of music, hills, and people, and take the reader just where the music and the mountains took him. Bound For Shady Grove is very highly recommended and rewarding reading for students of Appalachian history, culture, and music.

About the Author, Harvey

Steven Harvey is the author of three collections of personal essays: Lost in Translation, Bound for Shady Grove, (both Georgia), and A Geometry of Lilies. He lives in North Georgia, where he teaches English at Young Harris College.

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Kirkus Reviews

A banjo-picking English professor meditates on mountain music and rural lifestyles. Harvey (English/Young Harris Coll.) began his musical explorations like thousands of other boomers, sitting in front of a record player listening to Peter, Paul, and Mary and other icons of the folk music revival. Career and family concerns led him away from music, but in rural Georgia he discovered the Appalachian tradition of banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, and modal songs. The essays he collects here attempt to convey a sense of what this music says to a modern American, and how its values survive in our present-day world. Harvey has a strong feeling for the music (although he admits to being a mediocre player—one essay recounts his last-place finish in a banjo contest), and his enthusiasm is often contagious. His description of the construction of a homemade banjo is full of fascinating detail, and he is at his best when he refers to specific songs or musicians—even those the reader may never have heard of. But he can't resist the temptation to fish for deeper significance in his material, a desire that often leads him astray. His essays on the medieval church modes (the foundation of many old mountain songs) pontificate on the emotional significance of each mode, but Harvey's overwrought metaphors betray the subjective nature of his claims. At the same time, his failure to explain the musical structure of the modes will leave non-musician readers in the dark. He also makes much of the fact that a local pawnshop sells both musical instruments and firearms, a practice hardly unique to the rural South. But he is at his most eloquent when he gives up straining to find unplumbed depths intheexperiences of which he writes and lets the material speak for itself. Often precious, this will strike a chord nevertheless with many old folkies.