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A JOURNAL OF SHORT STORIES BY JUDY AUSLEY
Quite a Story-Teller
Back in 1994, when I was writing
feature stories in Watauga County,
someone in Boone told me about
folk singer, Bessie Mae Eldreth.
At the time she was about to be
presented with the North Carolina Folklore
Society’s Brown-Hudson Folklore Award in
Raleigh. The award is bestowed on a person
in North Carolina each year for their part in
performing and preserving folklife in NC.
The old gentlemen in Boone said,
“Judy if you see her, get her to tell you the
naked chicken tale.” He said, “She is from
around here and looks a lot like Loretta
Lynn.” Well, that perked my curiosity so I
asked around town and found out how to
get in touch with Bessie.
A couple of weeks after
that I set out driving up towards
Ashe County, but still a
part of rural Watauga County
in search of Bessie. I had also
been told by others that she
was quite a story-teller.
“Bessie is unique and
sings messages of the mountain South in a
way that paints a picture right before your
face,” Dr. Patricia Swain of UNC in Chapel
Hill explained to me after I learned she had
written her doctoral dissertation on Eldreth
and her music.
Swain explained that Eldreth sings songs
about three mountain identities: church,
family strife in the 1930’s and 1940’s in the
mountains and music about love gone wrong.
Some of her music that she sings, she sings
while washing clothes, rocking babies to sleep
and cooking meals on a wood stove.
Well, I found Bessie at the top of a
steep hill in Watauga, so steep that I had to
park my vehicle on the side of the road and
hike to the top to find her house. That day I
visited with her, she was singing an old ballad
she wrote called, “Those Ole TB Blues,”
a song about dying with tuberculosis.
We sat down near an the old wood stove
that piped out warmth for us and fit for the
wind hollowing outside. She had her modest
home furnished with pictures on the wall
of some of the entertaining she did over the
years and a few with the “famous Loretta” as
she called her. She added, that girl has always
been my idol. Her deep brown eyes shined
bright when I asked about her family.
Well, this High Country pioneer
woman got married at 16 and when I interviewed
her on that day she proudly said, “I
am 81 years old.” I was surprised because
she looked and acted like a younger person.
“Mountain life for any of us is hard
because my generation had to work in the
fields and in the house. She had 11 children
with her farmer husband, Ed Eldreth. The
mountain life has often been described by
I can remember
laughing like I
hadn’t laughed in
a long time.
different old-timers as hard and frightening.
From the stories I have done for so
long in the mountains this is true. The
generations before and during those ‘30s
and ‘40s was nothing but hard work for little
wage for what they did. Bessie was inspired
to write a song about her father called “Six
O’Clock Quittin’ Time.”
Bessie was like most of the women on
farms in that era. They worked on the farm
alongside their husbands in order to raise
vegetables to feed their families.
It was very hard on many young brides
in those days. She said smiling, “I worked
with Ed when we tried to clear land and we
were actually chopping hard rocks. They
rode horses back and forth
to the farmhouse when they
finished a days’ work.
It was a memorable
day visiting with Bessie and
yes, she told me the Naked
Chicken story. I can remember
laughing like I hadn’t
laughed in a long time.
Bessie said, “Well, the story happened
54 years ago. Eldreth was a young mother
of three and pregnant with her fourth child.
At the time they had 180 chickens on their
farm. One night she was awakened during
a nightmare and told Ed that she dreamed a
flood was going on, the water was high and
the chickens were all killed. She remembered
that it had been raining that time for
three weeks.
She said, Ed just laughed and turned
over in the bed.
History tells it as the 1940 flood in
the Watauga and Ashe counties area that
wiped out so many farm families. It was
a devastating time in the mountains for
the Eldreths. They had to flee their home
in the middle of the night. It was a flood.
There was nowhere to go but to the top of
the mountain, Eldreth said.
“Me and Ed walked back down to lower
ground when it was over to see if we could
salvage anything from the farm,” she said.
“Much to my horror,” she said, “everywhere
we looked dead chickens were lying
all over the place. Our chickens had their
feathers stripped from their bodies by the
fierce storm and the rain that poured all those
days.” It was devastating for the couple.
Eldreth said that she was afraid for a
long time and they just brushed themselves
off and started over again. Another trait of
mountain people. Mountain people do not
give in, they just start over again.
“You know as many times as I have
told the naked chicken story, Ed never
doubted any of my dreams or nightmares
again,” Bessie said, laughing.
Continued on page 38
Vol. 14, No. 6 — RAPID RIVER ARTS & CULTURE MAGAZINE — February 2011 13