Folksinger Lark McCourry is haunted by the memory of a song. As a child she heard it from her relatives in the North Carolina mountains, and she knows that the song has been in her family since 1759, when her ancestor, nine-year-old M...

Hang down your head, Tom Dooley…The folk song, made famous by the Kingston Trio, recounts a tragedy in the North Carolina mountains after the Civil War. Laura Foster, a simple country girl, was murdered and her lover Tom Dula was ha...

In 1934 all the national publications sent their star reporters to remote Virginia to cover the trial of Erma Morton: a beautiful twenty-one-year-old mountain girl with a teaching degree, accused of murdering her father – a drunken ...