Black Shawl

<p>Black Shawl emanates from Kathryn Stripling Byer's fascination with female ballad singers in southern Appalachia whose voices haunt the mountains still and from the image of a black net or shawl being dragged over the ground plumbing the depths collecting bits and fragments of a woman's life. The singers and storytellers of this collection are struggling to answer the query of the book's epigraph: "What will you make of this?"</p>