Loose Leaf Notes

“I spent five years transforming this building from the oldest operational jail in the entire state of North Carolina into what you see today,” Josh Copus (my son) said at the June Ballad Swap. Josh is a potter/artist and owner of the Old Marshall Jail, a boutique hotel bar and restaurant that is curated with Marshall history and installations of community bricks embedded with names and stories.

“That whole time my motivation was this thing that we’re doing here now,” Josh said. He spoke about turning something that was previously connected to trauma into something beautiful, saying that in his most challenging days working on the jail, he told himself, “There will be a day when this place is full of people having fun, being merry, eating and drinking.”

A ballad is a song that narrates a story in short stanzas. Traditionally they’re sung without musical accompaniment and are typically of unknown authorship, having been passed on orally from one generation to the next. The Ballad Swap night at OMJ’s Zadies Restaurant takes place the second Wednesday of each month at 6 pm.

Hanging out with Sheila Kay Adams, one of the best-known ballad singers in North Carolina, and her nest of birds, was a treat. I had heard her perform nine years ago at the Floyd Country Store (listen HERE). She was teacher to Elizabeth LaPrelle, who once co-hosted the Country Store’s Floyd Radio Show, and she has taught songs to some of our locals, like Ash Devine.

Wikipedia says this about Sheila: A seventh-generation ballad singer, storyteller, and claw-hammer banjo player, Sheila Kay Adams was born and raised in the Sodom Laurel community of Madison County, North Carolina, an area renowned for its unbroken tradition of unaccompanied singing of traditional southern Appalachian ballads that dates back to the early Scots/Irish and English Settlers in the mid-17th century… She made a musical appearance in the 1992 film Last of the Mohicans, and was a technical advisor and singing coach for the movie Songcatcher.

And above is Josh and Donna Ray Norton, second cousin to Sheila Kay Adams, explaining how they met and how the Ballad Swap at the OMJ’s restaurant began. It’s a wild 2-part story!

Donna and the OMJ Ballad Song Swap were recently featured in Oxford American magazine with a great write-up HERE.  She dedicated one of her songs, Wings of an Angel, to Rob Amberg, a local photographer who has documented Sodom, the Madison County mountain community scene where the ballad song scene has been concentrated and where Donna and Sheila and their kin are from.

I don’t remember ever getting so many goosebumps back to back. The songs reach deep.

Another really BIG highlight was when my son Josh, who is not one of the ballad singers, shared his version of a ballad that was dedicated to me and about growing up in Floyd County.

“It has all the components of a ballad. There’s a death, an unfaithful woman, a bible,” he said, and then surprised everyone till they caught on and sang along.

Ballads can be heart wrenching, but they can also be bawdy and some are downright funny.  Donna and Sheila’s daughter Melanie Rice Penland closed out the evening with a rousing traditional song that had some great ad-libbed lines.

Note: Two albums of old Ballad Songs are in the works, The Marshall Sessions and The Jail  Sessions, which will be available for sale at Ballad Swaps and at nestofsingingbirds.com.