She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes...

She'll be coming 'round the mountain when she comes,
She'll be coming 'round the mountain when she comes,
She'll be coming 'round the mountain, She'll be coming 'round the mountain,
She'll be coming 'round the mountain when she comes!
---first printed version of this American folk song appeared in Carl Sandburg's The American Songbag

The North Carolina mountains contain some of my favorite places on earth. I always feel like I'm breathing in home when I go there, even though I grew up on the other side, in Tennessee. And now I have a new way to explore the mountains, thanks to a bookmark I picked up at the North Carolina table at the National Book Festival, which led me to this website: Literary Trails of North Carolina.

Here's an excerpt from the site:

Everywhere you turn in North Carolina there are amazing stories. There is something particularly rich in the sound of stories as they are told by Tar Heels—the cadence and the color, the shoulder-to-shoulder intimacy of tragedy and humor—all offered in accents and syntax as variable as the geography of this 600-mile-wide landscape.

I'm sure they will eventually cover all of those 600 miles, but I'm glad that they started with the mountains. The book, Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains, includes the Joyce Kilmer National Forest, Flat Rock (Carl Sandburg's home), and The Grove Park Inn, which hosted F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. There is also a guide to annual literary events, so you can pick just the right days to visit.

P.S. There are also guidebooks for Blue Ridge Music Trails and Cherokee Heritage Trails.

P.P.S. The link to UNC Press, which publishes these guides, seems to be broken on the Literary Trails site, so here's a direct path: UNC Press.