The Storied Song

Here in Appalachia, we have a way of singing stories. Songs that carry real people, real places, real heartbreak — passed from voice to voice until the song itself becomes the memory. No two people tell them quite alike. That's not a flaw. That's how they stay alive. The Storied Song is a podcast from Appalachia Book Company that adapts traditional Appalachian ballads into original audio dramas, p...

Lord Bateman was a soldier. He sailed to the Turkish shore, landed in prison, and was freed by a woman who had no reason to help him — except that she wanted to. They made a vow: seven years. No other woman, no other man. Then come find me. "Lord Bateman" is among the oldest ballads in this collection, first documented on a nineteenth-century broadside published in Glasgow, Scotland, and rooted in...

The Devil came for a farmer's wife. He took her straight to Hell. She tore the place apart. He brought her back. That's the story within the ballad. It's been sung across the British Isles and through Appalachia for more than a century, and most versions play it for laughs: a woman so mean, even Hell won't have her. Cecil Sharp documented the ballad's popularity in World War I-era Appalachia, and...

In May 1868, Tom Dula was hanged for the murder of Laura Foster in Wilkes County, North Carolina. The ballad "Tom Dooley" made him famous. But the song leaves out the most important parts: Ann, Pauline, a pregnancy, and a jealousy that curdled into something fatal. This episode brings the story behind the ballad into close focus. Playwright Jess Wells writes these characters as fully human — reckl...

On September 27, 1903, a Southern Railway mail train left the tracks near Danville, Virginia. Eleven of eighteen crew members died. The engineer, Joseph Broady — known by the daredevil nickname "Steve" — was at the controls when the brakes failed on the Stillhouse Trestle. The ballad that followed made him famous in death in ways he never was in life. It also got his name wrong, his marital status...