For the first time in paperback, an acclaimed look at the American South Through the lenses of its most acclaimed storytellers and their tales.
He lives in Jonesborough, Tennessee..
Jimmy Neil Smith is the founder of the National Storytelling Festival and founder and president emeritus of the International Storytelling Center.
She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
About the Author: Pamela Petro works as a full-time writer and has contributed to the New York Times travel section, the Atlantic, Islands, and Forbes publications.
In Sitting Up with the Dead, Pamela Petro offers a paradoxical wake for the undying body of the Old South, to hear its truths and contemplate its robust afterlife in the tallest, "lyingest," most fruitful, and most haunting of its tales.
They contain bits of lived history, both from before the Civil War and after.
As distinctly American as jazz, they blend cultures and oral traditions as diverse as those of southern England, Ireland, West Africa, and native America.
They join communities as widespread as the coastal plains of the Carolinas and Georgia, the swamps of the Gulf Coast, and the mountains and valleys of Appalachia.
Stories provide the connective tissue of the South, linking the past with the present.
You encounter plat-eyes and boo-hags, Jack the trickster and Brer Rabbit, mule eggs, singing turtles, talking corpses, and flying Africans from the sea islands of South Carolina.
Among them are Ray Hicks, a National Heritage Fellow
Kathryn Windham, the "ghost lady"
Nancy Basket, a kudzu paper-maker
Colonel Rod, self-proclaimed "Florida cracker"; and Grammy Award-winner David Holt.
Some of them are local celebrities, others national treasures.
Here, take a ride with Pamela Petro as she embarks on a series of road trips Through the states of the Old South to collect its stories and meet its tellers of traditional tales.
Rarely does a nonfiction work come along that is as original and refreshing as Sitting Up with the Dead.
For the first time in paperback, an acclaimed look at the American South Through the lenses of its most acclaimed storytellers and their tales
