Smoky Mountain Voices

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. Smoky 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. Smoky Mountain Voices will be of interest to dialectologists, historians of American English, students of regional literature, scholars of folk life, and lay-persons interested in Southern Appalachia.