A Tree Accurst: Bobby McMillan and Stories of Frankie Silver

Abstract

A Tree Accurst: Bobby McMillan and Stones of Frankie Silver. By Daniel W. Patterson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 224, acknowledgments, photographs, illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper) A Tree Accurst is a landmark in folkloristic literature whose analytical strength draws power from collaborations among performers and scholars of expressive folk culture. Bobby McMillan, award-winning traditional singer and storyteller, and Daniel W. Patterson, Kenan Professor Emeritus of English and Folklore at UNC-Chapel Hill, have been friends since 1974, when a high school buddy of McMillan's, then Patterson's student, brought Bobby to the folk song class as a guest. "As soon as he started singing and talking about ballads," Patterson remembers, "it was obvious to me that he was one of the most important Appalachian tradition bearers of his generation in North Carolina" (2). Founded in long-standing mutual regard, the Patterson-McMillan collaboration gives us here a carefully detailed, multi-faceted, award-winning study (Chicago Folklore Prize, 2001) of a complex of traditional ideas and expressive forms that carry forward to our time several stories of the terrible events surrounding the ax murder of Charles Silver in 1831, and the 1833 hanging execution of his wife, Frankie Stewart Silver. A study of southern Appalachian social class and politics as represented through traditional arts and performance, A Tree Accurst has breadth of meaning beyond the Toe River area, where the murder and execution occurred, and where Bobby McMillan grew to a man learning to revere and perform the tales and songs of his neighbors and kin, women and men. Unanswered questions linger long after Charlie Silver's notorious murder, Frankie Silver's conviction for the crime, and her public hanging attended by ancestors of the western North Carolina folks who retell and dramatically recreate the history and legend in school play projects, a family museum, and a world wide web site (www.frankiesilver.com). Contested elements of the story still fascinate local and family historians; horrific and sympathetic aspects still inspire fiction writers, poets, classical music composers, and dance choreographers. Patterson addresses concepts of legend construction in community context; profiles the biographic resources for traditional performance and esthetics; explores issues of class and gender, family connection and conflict, for historical legend interpretation. And he comments on the often troubled relations between academic folklore and other formative cultural influences on public attitudes toward folk culture, notably public television and grant-funding agencies. The cursed tree grew near the murder site where once stood Charlie and Frankie's cabin. "They claimed that if you got up in [that tree], . . . you couldn't get out" (iii), McMillan explains, and sets the metaphor for his life long involvement with the multi-generation, multi-form stories of Frankie Silver. Patterson extends the image as useful for his analysis: "The tree is an emblem worthy of a Hawthorne tale, evocative of the long-lingering effects of crime and punishment, concealment and guilt. . . . We, too, if we climb into this tree, find ourselves caught in a tangle of questions, looking for some clean line of descent to the firm ground of Truth" (43). The original idea for this work was as supplementary material for a Davenport Films documentary of Bobby McMillan's 1992 telling of the story of Frankie and Charlie, and singing of the ballad, "Frankie Silver," reputed in legend as her own prison cell composition, spoken by her from the gallows. Grown well beyond a film supplement, Patterson's eloquent analysis and conclusion develops through seven independently focused chapters, each revealing a different set of perspectives about what McMillan calls "a story that happened." Bobby McMillan's biography, in chapter one, illuminates his discovery of personal fulfillment in learning and documenting the traditions of his Toe River area kin and friends, also descendants of Charlie and Frankie. …