I have long been a fan of Sharyn McCrumb’s “Ballad” novels which celebrate the heritage and culture of Southern Appalachia. Some of these carefully researched novels are set in the past while others explore links between past and present. McCrumb’s regional dialogue is rendered with perfect pitch, and her intricate plots are evocative of the distinctive mountain culture. Because I have so loved these novels, I couldn’t wait to read The Ballad of Tom Dooley. Alas, I was disappointed. Don’t get me wrong: this book is beautifully written, meticulously researched, and convincingly plotted. As always, McCrumb conjures up the post-Civil War period in western North Carolina in a compelling narrative. I couldn’t stop reading the book. I wanted to know what happened.
McCrumb set out to tell the story of Tom Dula, the man immortalized in the folksong made famous by The Kingston Trio in the 1950s. Tom Dula and his married lover were arrested for the murder of a neighbor, “simple country girl” Laura Foster. After a sensational trial, Dula was hanged, but not before making a jailhouse confession absolving his lover of any responsibility for the murder. In the course of her research, McCrumb began to question the outcome of the trial and the motives of Tom Dula. She came to her own conclusions about the outcome, conclusions that are entirely plausible and well-supported by historical evidence. I won’t say more here; read the book to discover her conclusions.
I was not disappointed in the historical accuracy of this novel. McCrumb does a good job sketching the contours of the disruption that the Civil War created in Appalachian life and probing the limited options available to women in the region. My disappointment was rooted in my literary expectations rather than my historical ones. There was not a single character in this novel that I came to care about, and that is highly unusual in any novel. I wanted to know what happened to them, but I didn’t care about them. The men were all weak pawns of manipulative and cruel women ruled by their own pathologies. In some cases, the weakness and the cruelty were born of Civil War privations, but in other cases, these traits were pathological and congenital.
I recommend the book. It is a good read and an edifying one. But don’t expect to like any of the characters.
To learn more about the impact of the Civil War in western North Carolina, I recommend the following books and web sites:
John C. Inscoe and Gordon B McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War
Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (The later chapters are excellent for giving you a real picture of women like Pauline and Laura Foster.)
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