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song as much as anything else that drove body saw her since that night. I expect an electric guitar, and it's sung slow and ing a background refrain. The words are Laurel Green away from Clay Ridge. No- sad-like with a country-style quartet singshe's waiting tables at some roadstand pretty much the way it happened; of somewhere--somewhere far off where she course, they've been made to rhyme. The can get through the night without hearing whole story is there in that song, and if that tune on the juke box. You see, a cowboy singer, a right famous one, made a record of that song with you care to hear it just go into any mountainside cafe. It's on all the juke boxes, William Wiser was born in Cincinnati but his family moved to North Georgia so that he is familiar with the locale of his story. He has lived in New York and for a number of years lately in the south of France with his French wife. During the past year he has been writer-in-residence at a mid-western university. "The Ballad of Jimmy Ray Jones" first appeared in The Antioch Review and is reprinted by permission. The white-haired mountain man stands at his garden gate. He's lean, and he's paler than his plum tree's blooms, Whose sudden glory, early spending, Now flakes his orchard path, While feathered love coos in the fresh softness of new greening. In jealous awe of this urgent burgeoning, The stooped farmer stands, anger-trembled, While spring modestly gowns the Red Bird's naked limbs With threads spun from rich flood-droppings-- A garment of Nature's dung-- And hides the river's face in a gay rouge that covers the blemishes of a mad orgy: Mud, debris, and death. There is no mooing, no cackling or grunting, No braying or crowing or bleating; Plaster has fallen on buckled floors, On veneer cracked and rolled, On iron cloaked in rust; Fabric has given birth to mildew in patterns too graphically etched-- Far time earth should be furrowed and planted, But the white-haired mountain farmer stands mocked by a slow dropping of white plum-tree rain, As spring spreads over Red Bird Valley unblushing, Thriving on disaster. Delmas W. Abbott
Appalachian Review – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Jan 8, 1975
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