ACKNOWLEDGMENTS "O Ugly Bird!" copyright © 1951 by Fantasy House, Inc. for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1951. "The Desrick on Yandro" copyright © 1952 by Fantasy House, Inc. for The Maga­zine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1952. "Vandy, Vandy" copyright © 1953 by Fantasy House, Inc. for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1953. "One Other" copyright © 1953 by Fantasy House, Inc. for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1953. "Call Me From the Valley" (later refilled, "Dumb Supper") copyright © 1954 by Fantasy House, Inc. for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1954. "The Little Black Train" copyright © 1954 by Fantasy House, Inc. for The Maga­zine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1954. "Shiver in the Pines" copyright © 1954 by Fantasy House, Inc. for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1955. "Walk Like a Mountain" copyright © 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc. for The Maga­zine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1955. "On the Hills and Everywhere" copyright © 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc. for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1956. "Old Devlins Was A-Waiting" copyright © 1956 by Fantasy House, Inc. for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1957. "Nine Yards of Other Cloth" copyright © 1958 by Mercury Press, Inc. for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1958. "Wonder As I Wander: Some Footprints on John's Trail Through Magic Mountains" copyright © 1962 by Mercury Press, Inc. for The Magazine of Fantasy and Sci­ence Fiction, March 1962. "Farther Down the Trail" (containing "John's My Name," "Why They're Named That," "None Wiser for the Trip," and "Nary Spell") copyright © 1963 by Manly Wade Wellman for Who Fears the Devil?. "Trill Coster's Burden" copyright © 1979 by Stuart David Schifffor Whispers II. "The Spring" copyright © 1979 by Charles L Grant for Shadows 2. "Owls Hoot in the Daytime" copyright © 1980 by Manly Wade Wellman for Dark Forces. "Can These Bones Live?" copyright © 1981 by Manly Wade Wellman for Sorcerer's Apprentice, Summer 1981. "Nobody Ever Goes There" copyright ©1981 by Manly Wade Wellman for Weird Tales #3. "Where Did She Wander?" copyright ©1987 by Stuart David Schifffor Whispers VI. CONTENTS Foreword: Manly in the Mountains by David Drake ................. ix Introduction: Just Call Me John by Karl Edward Wagner . xiii O Ugly Bird! ............................................................................... 1 The Desrick on Yandro ............................................................. 13 Vandy, Vandy ........................................................................... 25 One Other ................................................................................. 39 Call Me From the Valley ........................................................... 54 The Little Black Train ................................................................ 66 Shiver in the Pines ..................................................................... 82 Walk Like a Mountain ............................................................. 100 On the Hills and Everywhere ................................................... 116 Old Devlins Was A-Waiting .................................................. 124 Nine Yards of Other Cloth ...................................................... 144 Wonder As I Wander: Some Footprints on John's Trail Through Magic Mountains ................................................... 163 Farther Down the Trail ............................................................ 169 Trill Coster's Burden ............................................................... 172 The Spring .............................................................................. 184 Owls Hoot in the Daytime ....................................................... 196 Can These Bones Live? ........................................................ 209 Nobody Ever Goes There ....................................................... 219 Where Did She Wander?. .231 Foreword Manly in the Mountains Music brought Manly to the North Carolina mountains. Folk music—the old songs, real songs—had been an interest of Manly's since the 1920s when he tramped the Ozarks with Vance Randolph, the famed folklorist. He was drawn by the folk festival that he found when he moved with his family to Chapel Hill in 1951; became a friend of the organizer, Asheville native Bascom Lamar Lunsford; and traveled with Lunsford to meet "the best banjo player in the country." That was Obray Ramsey of Madison County, high in the Smokies where they divide North Carolina from Tennessee. It was the start of a life-long friendship, and the genesis as well of this book: the tales of John the Balladeer, hiking the hills of North Carolina with his silver-strung guitar. Manly and his wife Frances visited the mountains regularly, stay­ing in the Ramseys' house when they were alone and in a tourist cabin farther down on the French Broad River if they had their son or another friend with them. By the early '60s they had a little cabin of their own, next to the Ramseys and built in fits and starts over the years by them and their friends. It wasn't fancy, but it was a place to sleep and eat; and a place to have friends in to pick and sing and pass around a bottle of liquor, tax-paid or otherwise. That was where they were when my wife and I visited the mountains with them and with Karl Wagner in the Fall of 1971. The Ramseys' house is close by the road, Highway 25-70, which parallels the course of the French Broad River snaking through hard x Foreword rock. The mountains lowered down behind the house, and the river dropped away sharply on the other side of the road. One statistic will suffice to indicate the ruggedness of the terrain. There were seven attorneys in practice in Madison County when 25-70 was the direct route from Asheville to Knoxville. Shortly after Interstate 40 was completed, cutting off the business that had re­sulted from auto accidents on 25-70, six of the lawyers left. The seventh was the District Attorney. Manly's cabin was a little farther back from the road and a little higher up the mountain he called Yandro. The water system was elegant in its simplicity, a pipe that trailed miles from a high, clear spring to a faucet mounted four feet up above a floor drain in the cabin. There was a pressure-relief vent and settling pond partway down the mountainside. The vent could become blocked with debris, especially if the water hadn't been run for a time. The way you learned that it was plugged was— "Let me fix you a drink, Dutch," Manly said to Karl as we settled into the cabin. He poured bourbon into a plastic cup, held it under the spigot, and just started to open the tap. The water, with over a thousand feet of head, blew the cup out of his hand to shatter on the drain beneath. Nobody said anything for a moment. We stumbled up the mountainside in the dark—there was a moon, but the pines and the valley's steep walls blocked most of its light as they did the sun in daytime. Manly went partway, but when Obray guided Karl and me off the road-cut, he decided he'd wait. Wisely: he was 68 even then, though that was hard to remember when you saw him. He had fresh drinks waiting for those as used it when we got back —and fresh laughter as he always did, this time because Karl had slipped off the catwalk into one of Obray's trout ponds as we neared the cabin. Manly was in his element that evening, watching the incredible fingerings of Obray and a neighbor while lamplight gleamed from the gilded metalwork of the banjo and guitar; pouring drinks; sing­ing "Will the Circle be Unbroken" and "Birmingham Jail" and "Vandy, Vandy." . Which brings up a last point about Manly and the mountains. I said he called the mountain Yandro, but I don't know you'd find Foreword xi that name on a map. Manly blended past reality with new creations in his life as well as his writing. Many of the songs he sang and quoted in this volume are very old; he once claimed to have written "Vandy, Vandy" himself. And that may be part of the magic of these stories. They were written by a man who knew and loved the folkways he described so well that he became a part of them, weaving in his own strands and keeping the fabric alive instead of leaving it to be displayed behind the sterile glass of a museum. May you read them with a delight as great as that of the man who wrote them. Dave Drake Chapel Hill, North Carolina Introduction Just Call Me John There are moments in literature—very rare and very marvelous— when a writer creates a unique character. One such moment oc­curred in 1951 when Manly Wade Wellman began to write stories about John the Balladeer. He had no last name, no other name: he was known only as John. Some reviewers suggested that Wellman intended John to be a Christ figure. Manly firmly denied this, but he often hinted that there might exist some mystic link to John the Baptist (cf. Mark 1. 2-3). We never knew a lot about John's past. He was born in Moore County, North Carolina, and Manly said he sort of pictured John as a young Johnny Cash. He also told us that John was a veteran of the Korean War, and that he could hold up his end of things in a bar­room brawl. John had a profound knowledge of Southern folklore and folksongs—as did Manly. John had a guitar strung with silver strings, a considerable knowledge of the occult, and his native wit. He needed all three as he wandered along the haunted ridges and valleys of the Southern Appalachians—sometimes encountering su­pernatural evil, sometimes seeking it out. John first appeared in the December 1951 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but Wellman had given us foreshadowings. He sometimes liked to claim that two stories from Weird Tales, "Sin's Doorway" (January 1946) and "Frogfather" (November 1946), were stories about John before he got his silver-strung guitar, but usually he grouped them instead with his other regional fantasies. Not coincidentally, following his move from New Jersey to Moore County, North Carolina after the War, Wellman began to make use of Southern legends and locales in his stories.