"
"You are a singer, I observe."
"I'm melodious nacheral, but I'm gettin' so I sort o' stumbles in my
notes. Shoutin' an' singin' 'round a passel of cattle to keep 'em
from stampedin' on bad nights has sp'iled my voice, that a-way.
Thar's nothin' so weakenin', vocal, as them efforts in the open air
an' in the midst of the storms an' the elements. What for a song is
that I'm renderin'? Son, I learns that ballad long ago, back when
I'm a boy in old Tennessee. It's writ, word and music, by little
Mollie Hines, who lives with her pap, old Homer Hines, over on the
'Possum Trot. Mollie Hines is shore a poet, an' has a mighty sight
of fame, local. She's what you-all might call a jo-darter of a poet,
Mollie is; an' let anythin' touchin' or romantic happen anywhere
along the 'Possum Trot, so as to give her a subjeck, an' Mollie
would be down on it, instanter, like a fallin' star. She shorely is
a verse maker, an' is known in the Cumberland country as 'The
Nightingale of Big Bone Lick.' I remembers when a Shylock over to
the Dudleytown bank forecloses a mortgage on old Homer Hines, an'
offers his settlements at public vandue that a-way, how Mollie
prances out an' pours a poem into the miscreant.
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