White Oak Flats

Old-Time Mountain SongThere''s a place in Tennessee just across the line No one ever goes up there it''s too rough a climb You won''t find the name or place wrote on any map Folks down here ''round Shelton''s Trace calls it White Oak Flats. Hazel Taylor was my wife and I loved her so We was married on Shelton''s Trace fifteen years ago Now I lie here all alone wonderin'' on the past Wonderin'' why she left our home to go to White Oak Flats. I don''t know how he looked at her I don''t know what he said I don''t know what he could have done to turn poor Hazel''s head Never in her darkest hour could she imagine that She''d agree to go with him up to White Oak Flats. I can see the rocky trail up the mountain side I can see poor Hazel now lying by his side Folks down here still talks about how it come to pass Nothing but the silence now up on White Oak Flats Hazel Tighrow is a woman born far back in the Appalachian Mountains in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. who explodes all the stereotypes. Where she should be an unlettered drudge ready to marry young and produce ten children she is instead a reflective self-taught well-read and sensitive young woman who desperately wants the freedom to grow into herself. Still because she is so aware she knows whence she comes and tries to fit-in as best she can. She eventually marries a caring young man George Taylor and does what she can to settle-in to the life of the mountains. Listen to the author''s recording of the White Oak Flats song played on a fretless gourd-banjo in the old two-finger style on YouTube.