In 1987 Patricia Sawin, originally from Colorado, was a Ph.D. candidate in folklore at Indiana University. Bessie Eldreth was a seventy-three-year-old mother of eleven children who’d lived most of her life in the North Carolina mountains.

They met that year at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Carolina folklorist Glenn Hinson had invited Eldreth there, because people had told him about “the lady who sings in church.” At the festival, Eldreth sang hymns as well as traditional ballads such as “Knoxville Girl.” And she cooked — biscuits, chicken and dumplings, and blackberry pie. One day, Sawin sat down with Eldreth at a picnic table to eat lunch. “I just cut loose telling her things,” Eldreth says.

Back in Indiana, Sawin sent Eldreth a letter, asking if she could visit. Eldreth wrote back, “Child, you’re as welcome as the water that runs.”

Sawin visited Eldreth once in Boone, North Carolina, then went back to stay for the summer of 1988. She spent time with Eldreth almost every day and went to church with her most weekends. She had decided to write her dissertation on Eldreth, and at first she focused on capturing Eldreth’s performances of songs and ghost stories. But she also interviewed Eldreth, sitting at the kitchen table with a tape recorder. Sawin thought of these conversations as mostly background material. But they soon became the focus of Sawin’s dissertation and a book. “I realized that Bessie was somebody with stories to tell,” Sawin says.

Sawin was struck by Eldreth’s account of getting married when she was sixteen, mostly because her mother wanted her to. Eldreth told Sawin, “The day I married, I laid down in an open field aside of a stump and I cried till I thought I was gonna die.”

“The first time that she told me the story, I went home that night and just sobbed,” Sawin says.

The book includes verbatim excerpts from this and other stories that Eldreth tells, as well as glimpses into Eldreth and Sawin’s seventeen-year friendship. “At first I tried to keep myself out of the book and focus entirely on Bessie’s words,” Sawin says. “But I can’t pretend that I’m not the person she told it to. An important part of her skill is how she adapts her stories to changing audiences.”

For example, some of the most vivid stories about Eldreth’s husband came out in conversations that included not only Sawin but also anthropologist Dorothy Holland and folklorist Cecilia Conway. All three hold “explicitly feminist views,” Sawin writes. The women didn’t say that to Eldreth, but she realized she did not “have to bite her tongue in this company,” Sawin writes.

Today, Eldreth readily speaks about her displeasure with her husband, who died in 1976. “Younguns, he never would work,” she says. “I’d go and work like a horse, on the mountain, pulling corn, for fifty cents a day,” she says. She also earned money by baby-sitting, doing housework for other families, even cutting timber. Once, she sold her only pair of shoes for two dollars, then used the money to buy a pig to feed her family. She cut down some trees, split the wood, and built the pig a pen.

As Sawin analyzed Eldreth’s stories, she realized that Eldreth doesn’t define herself by region — as an “Appalachian woman” — but by class and the amount and type of work she had to do. “I thought, in all of this, what do I think Bessie most wants to get across to other people?” Sawin says. For one thing, “Bessie wants people to see her as someone who worked really hard. I realized that she was still thinking about people in the past who looked down on her for being poor.”

Sawin organized the book around such themes, including Eldreth’s hard work, religious experiences, ghost stories, and practical jokes. A long chapter discusses the nearly two hundred traditional, popular, and religious songs Eldreth has memorized. “What’s most fascinating is the way she employs cultural resources to convey her individuality,” Sawin says.

Sawin and Eldreth still visit several times a year. “She’s my little girl,” Eldreth says. Eldreth has given away copies of the book to members of her church choir.

“I’ve got three left,” she says. “I think I’ll hold on to them.”