A stingy man "won't drink branch water till there's a flood," and it is "a mighty triflin' sort o' man'd let either his dog or his woman starve." Some places are "so crowded you couldn't cuss a cat without gettin' fur in your mouth." For almost thirty years Horace Kephart collected sayings like these from his neighbors and friends in the area around Bryson City, North Carolina. Kephart, a librarian with an interest in languages and in the American Frontier, left his career and his family in midlife to settle in what was at the turn of the century the wilds of the Great Smokey Mountains. An assiduous collector and observer, he compiled twenty-six journals of notes on the folkways and speech of the Southern Appalachians at a time when the region was still largely isolated. Smokey Mountain Voices is a dictionary of Southern Appalachian speech based on Kephart's journals and publications; it is also a compendium of mountain lore. Harold Farwell and J. Karl Nicholas have compiled not only quaint and peculiar words, but jokes and comic exchanges. Many of the "ordinary" words that comprised an important part of the language of the mountaineers are preserved here thanks to Kephart's meticulous collecting. The editors have incorporated the original quotations with Kephart's definitions and explanations to create a rich source for the study of southern mountain speech. And within the echoes of these Smokey Mountain voices exists some of the joy and fullness of life that Horace Kephart shared and recorded. Smoky Mountain Voices will be of interest to dialectologists, historians of American English, students of regional literature, scholars of folk life, and laypersons interested in Southern Appalachia.

Oral histories capture vanishing lifestyles of Appalachian natives

Often considered merely a repository of archaic or even Elizabethan English, the language of southern Appalachia represents a distinctive American dialect that is both conservative and innovative. This dictionary marks the first comprehensive, historical record of the traditional speech of this region. Focusing on the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee and western North Carolina, it features more than six thousand names, usages, meanings, and folk expressions that are found in the region, exemplified by more than fifteen thousand documented quotations.

Who wants Rachel Davenport dead? Seth Hammond won't stop until he gets answers. Tapped by the FBI to find out who's targeting the heiress gives the former Tennessee bad boy the chance to atone for his past sins. But it's his future he's worried about when Seth finds himself falling for Rachel…who's in graver danger than anyone in their small mountain town of Bitterwood realizes. Ever since she was named CEO of her family business, strange things have been happening—terrifying incidents that could be tied to Rachel's violence-shadowed past. Seth's the only one who doesn't think she's losing her mind. Her intense, rough-around-the-edges protector has blindsided her with his passion. But Rachel also believes in Seth—believes he's a good man looking for redemption…and possibly love?

For two years, a mysterious and increasingly violent criminal terrorized the countryside near Shade Gap, Pennsylvania. One warm spring afternoon in 1966, he committed his penultimate outrage: he kidnapped a girl. Taken from her family at gunpoint, Peggy Ann Bradnick was dragged into the impenetrable forests of the Appalachian Mountains. Miraculously, the victim withstood not only the abduction, but the fame that followed it. Fifty years later, the survivor of that weeklong ordeal at the hands of a deranged kidnapper tells her own story, as it has never been told before: not only of the crime that changed her life, but the lifetime that has followed.

The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English is a revised and expanded edition of the Weatherford Award–winning Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, published in 2005 and known in Appalachian studies circles as the most comprehensive reference work dedicated to Appalachian vernacular and linguistic practice. Editors Michael B. Montgomery and Jennifer K. N. Heinmiller document the variety of English used in parts of eight states, ranging from West Virginia to Georgia—an expansion of the first edition's geography, which was limited primarily to North Carolina and Tennessee—and include over 10,000 entries drawn from over 2,200 sources. The entries include approximately 35,000 citations to provide the reader with historical context, meaning, and usage. Around 1,600 of those examples are from letters written by Civil War soldiers and their family members, and another 4,000 are taken from regional oral history recordings. Decades in the making, the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English surpasses the original by thousands of entries. There is no work of this magnitude available that so completely illustrates the rich language of the Smoky Mountains and Southern Appalachia.