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Blanton’s new book highlights ‘Balsam Mountain English’
By Lynn Hotaling
When Curtis Blanton started writing down the stories he remembered from his boyhood days, he wasn’t aiming to write a book.
“I was just reliving my childhood,” he said of “Tales from the Porch,” a collection of “tall tales and short stories” he recently published. “Most of it’s the truth – so much of ti’s the truth.”
Longtime friends Jim Sellers, left, and Curtis Blanton hold up a copy of Blanton’s new book, “Tales from the Porch: Tall Tales and Short Stories from the North Carolina Mountains.” Sellers provided sketches to accompany Blanton’s chapters. Both Blanton and Sellers will be at City Lights Bookstore this Saturday for a reading and book signing.
Blanton, who grew up in the Addie and Ochre Hill communities, will be at City Lights Bookstore at 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 26, to read from and autograph his book, which features illustrations by Blanton’s longtime friend, Jim Sellers of Sylva, who will also be on hand to sign copies.
Sellers and Blanton met during third grade at the old Beta School and have been friends ever since. They moved on to Sylva Elementary for eighth grade and graduated from Sylva High School in 1954. The two left Sylva that same year for the Air Force, with Sellers making a career of it and Blanton returning to Jackson County to earn a degree at Western Carolina University.
Jackson County native Curtis Blanton, who now lives in Norris, Tenn., has written and published “Tales From the Porch.” He will read and sign copies of his book during a 2 p.m. event at City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, Aug. 26. Blanton’s longtime friend, Jim Sellers, illustrated the stories and is featured in the cover illustration by Tennessee artist Terry Chandler.
Blanton, whose family lived near the old olivine mine (now the Jackson County staffed recycling center on Mineral Springs Road, moved to Ochre Hill after rocks started falling in their yard from the mine’s blasting.
During their boyhood days, the two spent most of their time outdoors, Blanton said.
“We’ve been on every mountain anywhere you can look,” he said. “We’ve been there day and night. We’ve night-hunted, day-hunted, fished all over Sugarloaf, Doubletop and Roundtop mountains.”
A former teacher who was once an assistant principal at Sylva-Webster High School, Blanton nsaid he started the book while he was overseas working for the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1994 through 1999. He was living in Vienna, Austria, when he said he started thinking about home and remembering his early years in Jackson County.
He termed his first efforts at story-writing, which he shared with friends and relatives back home, “nozzles,” after something his grandfather once said.
“My granddad was trying to get one of my uncles who liked to read to help with something around the farm and complained that he couldn’t “get that boy to do anything but read those old ‘nozzles,’” Blanton said.
As he began putting his memories down on paper, Blanton said he realized how the stories he remembers from his childhood are special.
“We were isolated back then, but we had entertaining stories,” he said. “The old people would tell stories whenever they came to visit, and we loved to see certain ones coming because we knew they would sit on the porch and tell stories.”
Another reason for writing the stories was to share a sense of the place where he grew up with others who remember those days.
“I wanted to leave something for my family and friends who grew up when I did to remind them how it was – how it really was,” Blanton said.
Everyone he sent the stories to liked them, and Blanton, who had moved to Oak Ridge, Tenn., in 1968 to work for the Atomic Energy Commission, began taking classes at a nearby education center for retirees after he returned from Austria.
It was then that work on the stories that would become “Tales from the Porch” began in earnest.
“My teachers encouraged me, and my son, Sam, and the rest of my family wanted me to do it,” Blanton said.
It was at a Sylva High School 50th reunion in 2004 that Blanton first discussed the idea with Sellers.
“I asked Jim if he’d read three or four of my ‘nozzles’ and consider doing some sketches to illustrate them,” Blanton said. “I remembered he used to sketch during school.”
According to Sellers, those drawings were his work last winter. Blanton would write a story and the send it along to Sellers to be illustrated.
“I didn’t change a single sketch,” Blanton said. But the stories were written and rewritten.”
The stories in the book cover a wide range of topics, from religion to making moonshine, and are written in the vernacular used by old-timers during Blanton’s boyhood – a dialect Blanton has termed “Balsam Mountain English.”
“I remembered their stories and the words they used,” Blanton said.
To illustrate his point, Blanton told about the time he and some cousins hiked over to Old Bald where Will Hooper of Brasstown – grandfather of former Superintendent Earl Hooper – and some of the older men were camping out and checking on their cattle. A half-dozen or so of the old men would go over to Old Bald on Thursday and stay all weekend and when the boys got done with their chores, they would go too so they could listen to the stories the old-timers would tell, Blanton said.
“We loved to hear their big tales – they would sit up and tell tales all night,” Blanton said, adding that his book features a story of one visit to Old Bald.
Another subject of Blanton’s stories is the various entertainments he and his cousins and friends would think up to do during their leisure time.
“When we grew up, there was very little to do,” he said. “The only thing we could do was go to church or to revivals, so what we saw at church is what we did when we were playing.”
Blanton and the others would hold services and have funerals, with various cousins acting out the parts and cousin Harry Cope, who could mimic any mountain minister, always in the pulpit. The opening story in “Tales from the Porch,” describes an event that came about when the young “congregation” realized they had enacted all kinds of religious ceremonies but had never had a baptism.
According to Blanton, each youngster brought their family cat in a tow sack in order that Preacher Harry could cleanse it of its sins. On the appointed afternoon, Rev. Harry took his place at the Turn Hole in Scotts Creek and organized the others so the cats could be passed to him one at a time for baptism. He would then pass the cats to the children on his other side so they could be dried off and re-sacked.
Things were going along according to plan until someone presented a stray (and wild) Persian to be cleansed.
“When Pete got the big Persian about halfway out of the sack, it saw daylight and jumped right through Brother Roland’s outstretched arms, leaving three deep scratches and headed straight for Rev. Harry,” Blanton writes. “Harry took a giant step backward just as the Persian whizzed by on top of the water. Other than the bottom of its paws, that cat was completely dry when it hit the bank on the other side of the Turn Hole and disappeared into the woods.”
According to Blanton, he changed many of the names of his book’s characters “to protect the guilty,” but that most who knew the people can easily recognize them.
“Jim knew who everybody was,” Blanton said. “He knew the people and knew their ways. He knew firsthand about mountain people as well as I did.”
A few real names are included if Blanton had permission.
“Many of those mentioned in the book are cousins who are glad to be a part of it,” he said.
In addition to providing the sketches that illustrate each story, Sellers is the model for the cover illustration by Tennessee artist Terry Chandler. It shows Sellers sitting on his porch with Doubletop and Sugarloaf mountains in the background.
“It’s been a fun project,” said Blanon, even though all the stories were written between midnight and 5 a.m.
“I’d think of a story and start laughing,” Blanton said. “Then I’d get up and write it down.”
Blanton said one of the main reasons he wrote the book was to document real mountain stories.
“These are authentic – they’re not somebody from New York writing about these mountains.”
Others who grew up in Addie and knew the people Blanton writes about agree that Blanton succeeded.
“The stories about the ones I knew – like Uncle George and Aunt Vady Norman – are just like them,” said former Sylva Herald columnist Harold Norman. “They were as fine a people as I’ve ever known. Reading the book, I could hear Uncle George talking.”
Another Addie native, longtime Asheville Citizen-Times columnist and author Bob Terrell, devoted his Aug. 20 column to Blanton’s new book.
“I think it’s the best book on what he calls ‘Balsam Mountain English’ and the tall tales mountaineers tell that I have read in many years,” Terrell said. “The way he writes reminds me of my Great Uncle Ranzy Crawford of Willets, who lived to the age of 102. As I read the book, I could hear Uncle Ranzy talking. I would recommend this book to the Queen of England.”
For more information about Saturday’s City Lights event, or to reserve a signed copy, call the bookstore at 586-9499. Information about Blanton’s “Tales from the Porch” is also available online at porchtales.com.
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