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.

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9780820321974

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Reviews

This collection of essays about the South and its music is well crafted, lyrical, written by a keen observer of humankind. . . . Throughout Bound for Shady Grove Harvey allows us to see that music offers more than a way to express our sorrow--it offers consolation and joy. -- Fourth Genre

This collection of essays about the South and its music is well crafted, lyrical, written by a keen observer of humankind. . . . Throughout Bound for Shady Grove Harvey allows us to see that music offers more than a way to express our sorrow--it offers consolation and joy.--Fourth Genre

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 playerone 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 musicianseven those the reader may never have heard of. But he cant 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 Harveys 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 in the experiences of which he writes and lets the material speak for itself. Often precious, this will strike a chord nevertheless with many old folkies. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

STEVEN HARVEY is a professor of English at Young Harris College. The author of A Geometry of Lilies: Life and Death in an American Family, he was a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 1994. He lives in north Georgia.

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