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Manly in the Mountains


Music brought Manly to the North Carolina mountains.

Folk musicтАФthe old songs, real songsтАФhad been an interest of Manly's since the 1920s when he
tramped the Ozarks with Vance Randolph, the famed folklorist. He was drawn by the folk festival that he
found when he moved with his family to Chapel Hill in 1951; became a friend of the organizer, Asheville
native Bascom Lamar Lunsford; and traveled with Lunsford to meet "the best banjo player in the
country."

That was Obray Ramsey of Madison County, high in the Smokies where they divide North Carolina
from Tennessee. It was the start of a life-long friendship, and the genesis as well of this book: the tales of
John the Balladeer, hiking the hills of North Carolina with his silver-strung guitar.

Manly and his wife Frances visited the mountains staying in the Ramseys' house when they were alone
and in a tourist cabin father down on the French Broad River if they had their son or another friend with
them. By the early '60s they had a little cabin of their own, next to the Ramseys and built in fits and starts
over the years by them and their friends.

It wasn't fancy, but it was a place to sleep and eat; and a place to have friends in to pick and sing and
pass around a bottle of liquor, tax-paid or otherwise. That was where they were when my wife and I
visited the mountains with them and with Karl Wagner in the Fall of 1971.

The Ramseys' house is close by the road, Highway 25-70, which parallels the course of the French
Broad River snaking through hard rock. The mountains lowered down behind the house, and the river
dropped away sharply on the other side of the road.

One statistic will suffice to indicate the ruggedness of the terrain. There were seven attorneys in practice
in Madison County when 25-70 was the direct route from Asheville to Knoxville. Shortly after Interstate
40 was completed, cutting off the business that had resulted from auto accidents on 25-70, six of the
lawyers left.

The seventh was the District Attorney.

Manly's cabin was a little farther back from the road and a little higher up the mountain he called
Yandro. The water system was elegant in its simplicity, a pipe that trailed miles from a high, clear spring
to a faucet mounted four feet up above a floor drain in the cabin. There was a pressure-relief vent and
settling pond partway down the mountainside. The vent could become blocked with debris, especially if
the water hadn't been run for a time, The way you learned that it was plugged wasтАФ

"Let me fix you a drink, Dutch," Manly said to Karl as we settled into the cabin. He poured bourbon into
a plastic cup, held it under the spigot, and just started to open the tap.

The water, with over a thousand feet of head, blew the cup out of his hand to shatter on the drain
beneath.

Nobody said anything for a moment.
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