The Ballad of Laurel Springs

Janet Beard Schools of Public Engagement '05

Ten-year-old Grace is in search of a subject for her fifth-grade history project when she learns that her great-great-great-great-grandfather stabbed his lover to death.

His grisly act was memorialized in a murder ballad, her aunt tells her, so it must have happened. But the lessons of that revelation - to be careful of men and desire - are not just Grace 's to learn. Her family 's tangled past is part of a dark legacy in which the lives of generations of women are affected by the violence immortalized in folksongs like "Knoxville Girl" and "Pretty Polly," reminding them always to know their place - or risk the wages of sin.

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