Meet the Appalachian spell-catcher

Dale Neal | The Citizen-Times

A buckeye carried in the pocket brings good luck or wards off rheumatism. You can wipe away warts with your mama's dishrag, then bury the rag or beat it on a stone. Never let a rocking chair rock by itself — it portends a death in the family.

Those quaint Appalachian folk cures, spells and omens go back generations but they didn't die off with your grandparents on the farm.

Byron Ballard tracks down many of those customs of the country in her latest book "Asfidity and Mad-Stones: A Further Ramble through Hillfolks' Hoodoo."

A century ago, collectors like Cecil Sharp roamed the coves of Western North Carolina, recording ballads that had their roots an ocean away in the British isles. They became known as song-catchers.

Ballard has cast herself a new role as Appalachian spell-catcher, collecting and preserving an often overlooked piece of homegrown culture.

Ballard may be better known as Asheville's village witch, the elder priestess of Mother Grove Goddess Temple, but first and foremost, she is a native of Appalachia, "raised redneck" as she says at the top of a west Buncombe cove by a long line of staunch Methodists and Baptist preachers.

She started exploring the traditions of home healing and herb remedies in her first book, "Staubs and Ditchwater: A Friendly and Useful Introduction to Hillfolks' Hoodoo." As she began digging into the folklore, she found that little academic research has been done in the field.

In her travels, Ballard found many people put off at first by the idea of a pagan priestess.

But when she started talking about folk remedies, or bringing out Mason jars of rabbit tobacco or mica pieces, they recognized a common spirit. "Oh my grandmother used to do that," was a common theme.

"Then you mention home remedies like catnip tea. 'Oh Lord, the catnip tea." And the cascade of stories just begins," Ballard said.

She chafes at the easy stereotypes of the Beverly Hillbillies, Li'l Abner and Snuffy Smith she grew up with in popular culture.

The "hillbillies" that the broader culture likes to laugh at or look down on have their own knowledge of herbal remedies and folk cures handed down from generation to generation. The same Scots-Irish and other immigrants who settled the coves of Southern Appalachia brought the folklore along with the fiddle music that became mountain music or the distilling arts of moonshine.

She hopes to continue her quest in a third volume, traveling to the borderlands between Scotland and England to trace where many of these spells originated, like the old churning song. "Come, butter, come. Come, butter, come" was first noted as a work chant and a spell by Victorian collector Alexander Carmichael in his "Carmina Gadelica," first published in 1900.

Her research "points to what's important," said Sara Amis with the University of Georgia. "This is social history, not the history of dates and battles and presidents, but of common people, and it's extraordinarily persistent. There are certain spells that come to us through winding paths from Roman times. Appalachia preserved a lot of this lore along with the music and the food. It says something about the persistence of culture."

Modern medicine is starting to pay attention to the home remedies with the basic ingredients. Much of the store bought medicines started with what folk tradition has called the "Three Sovereign Remedies" — camphor, menthol and eucalyptus.

"Vicks VapoRub that you put on your chest for a cold uses all three of those herbs," Ballard said.

Aspirin came from a chemical derived from the willow tree. While the synthesized medicine can cause stomach pain, "if you drink a tea from the bark of willow, you get the pain relief without the tummy ache," Ballard said.

Many rural people didn't have money to pay doctors, or may have distrusted them, relying on home remedies that often worked.

"As little as 100 years ago, the mountains were our pharmacy. People went into the woods for the plants," said Crystal Wilson, who runs the Turtle Mountain Herbs botanical sanctuary outside Knoxville, Tennessee. Wilson met Ballard at a recent Southeast Wild Women Conference held in Black Mountain.

Her teenage son resonated with Ballard's books, detailing the lore of his grandparents, Wilson said. "A lot of these people are dying off. It's part of preserving the culture."

Ballard remembers how families in coves would use a common remedy to sooth teething babies. There was a Mercury-head dime, back in the days before Franklin Roosevelt was pictured on the coin, with a hole drilled through it and tied with a dirty string. The homemade talisman was placed around the neck of a baby with teething pains.

"Whenever there was a baby who needed it, the call would go out through the cove. 'Who's got the dime?' I don't think they ever replaced that string," Ballard recalled.

Asfidity or asafoetida was popular at the turn of the 20th century during what Ballard labels "the Golden Age of Patent Medicines." Wearing a chunk of the herb around the neck was believed to ward off the influenza epidemic that swept the nation after World War I.

"Various other things would go into the bag with (the chunk of asfidity) — little talismans for good luck ... that often included a penny, a small nail, a shard of broken mirror or piece of mica, a bit of honeycomb and some mud dauber nest," she writes.

Mad-stones, the calcified nubs found in deer stomachs, were believed to have curative powers, drawing out infections from wounds or even treating a bite from a rabid dog. "The stone had to be boiled in milk before use and has to be tended lovingly between uses," Ballard writes. "A holler might only have one and it would be passed from person to person as the need arose."

Much of the knowledge and herb lore was kept by root doctors or granny women as they were variously known. Each cove was likely to have its own old man, especially skilled in dowsing or water witching, able to locate the best place to dig a well with the use of a forked stick or even bent wires held in their hands.

"My initial motivation was to collect what was disappearing, but I found much of this hasn't really died out. People are still practicing some of things," Ballard said. "These are beautiful old traditions in their simplicity and that Appalachian people can be proud of."

IF YOU GO

Byron Ballard will have a launch party for her book "Asfidity & Mad-Stones: A Further Ramble through Hillfolks' Hoodoo" at 7 p.m. Monday at Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe, 55 Haywood St., Asheville