Review of "Sing Me Back Home" by David Boone

David Boone, Western North Carolina wood carver of nationally renowned fame and accomplished painter and musician, has pulled a new trick out of his hat of artistic talents: that of master story teller. With his newly published book, Sing Me Back Home, Boone at long last brings to the public his Vietnam War stories that give credit to veterans as few books from that time have done.

Told in a voice that is rich with the heritage of the Black Mountains in whose shadows he grew up, Sing Me Back Home is a collection of tales and photographs that bring to life in an often humorous fashion some otherwise very dark moments. “I wanted to tell about the Vietnam War the way I saw it, not how Hollywood tells it,” Boone reports. “So many negative things have been said about this war. All the movies dwell on the gory aspects, on bombing villages, whatever. But that’s not what I saw.”

Boone was drafted into the Army in December of 1966, barely a year after he married Elaine Hensley, also a Yancey County native. Less than a year and many funny tales later, he landed in Cam Ranh Bay to join the 1097 Medium Boat Company, only to discover on his first night there that his arrival would mark the very first time the giant, sprawling base was to come under enemy attack. “I could hear machine gun fire, small arms fire, and mortar rounds coming from everywhere. It did not sound very good,” he dryly recounts. From that point things went down hill fast for the next 12 months, as he so clearly relates in his humorous story teller’s voice honed as a youngster sitting at the feet of his grandfather Ewart Wilson, long regarded as a master story teller of Western North Carolina mountain lore.

Why the humor about such a grizzly experience, one might ask.

“Well, it wasn’t really a lot of fun in Vietnam, but I didn’t want to be a whiner. If you sort of didn’t put a bit of a twist on things, it could get under your skin pretty bad,” Boone explains. “It could get you a bit crazy, and I didn’t want to be that way, so you sort of put a wall up. You needed that wall so that you weren’t upset and nervous all the time.” Humor was that wall.

Boone’s Vietnam book is actually a memoir, recounting how he tried to get into the Nashville music scene, then met his wife Elaine and settled down a bit, and then got his unexpected draft notice at age 27. He recounts in great detail his training experiences and his surprise posting to of all things an Army boat company. His stories unfold through some of the worst fighting in the Mekong Delta, all the way through the infamous Tet Offensive. He does not gloss over the fighting and bloodshed, but he does not dwell on it either. “Everybody knows it was a war,” he notes. Instead, he goes to great pains to humanize his fellow soldiers. “I wanted to tell about what went on between the battles, what we were really like.”

Boone also wanted to leave a legacy to his children and grandchildren, and his next project will continue that effort. Called “Papa’s Bear Stories,” his second book will be a collection of tales as told by his grandfather Ewart Wilson, grandson of Big Tom Wilson, a famous bear hunter and guide from Yancey County.  “My granddaddy, whom we all called ‘Papa’, and his granddaddy did a lot of bear hunting together, and my brother and I heard his wonderful stories over and over again sitting at Papa’s knees. These tales are really worth preserving.”

Review written by Worth Weller.

Writers from the Past: A Call to Writers & Families from the Toe River Anthology 1979

               

Thirty-five years ago a group of novice writers began meeting in the mezzanine of the Burnsville Library.  Mayland Technical Institute (now Mayland Community College) cosponsored the class with the newly-established Toe River Arts Council. The teacher was a retired English professor from Asheville, Dr. Francis Pledger Hulme, who cajoled, encouraged and teased the 24 members, ages 18 to 80, into producing poetry, fiction and memoirs.  He was so impressed by the writing he was seeing that he suggested publishing an anthology.  Dr. Hulme selected the contents of the Toe River Anthology 1979.  Marilyn Cade illustrated the book, Yancey Graphics produced it, and the Toe River Arts Council sold it until there were no more.

            Some of the original writers continued to write and to meet in a group that adopted the name of The Scribblers and continues to this day.  Others wrote on their own or moved on to other activities or away from the area. Now with an invitation from the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, a few of the original group plus two from The Scribblers will be on stage in the Burnsville Town Center on Saturday, September 14, at 11:00 a.m. to read from the anthology and from their more recent writing as well. 

The theme of this year’s festival of “Take Me There” befits this reading, which will be given by Donna Jean Dreyer, Susan Larson, Pat Riviere-Seel, and Ruth Pope, and will honor all the writers in the anthology as well as the Scribblers.  Those writers were Sally Burrowes, Gladys Coletta, Mabel Cox, Phyllis Downing, Jewell Hall, Mary and Robert Helmle, Frances Higgins, Dessie Honeycutt, Stormy Honeycutt, Mary Kay Klein, Susan Larson, Carmela Mandala, Dorothy Morgan, Hilda Nocks, Della Ogilvie, Beverly Plummer, Ruth Pope, Barbara Talley, Fred Topping, Leonard Widawski, Carmela and Maurice Woodruff, and Jo Woody.  Family and friends of these writers are especially encouraged to attend the free event.

            Toe River Anthology 1979 is being reprinted and will be available to purchase at the literary festival.  Within the anthology readers will find a broad cross-section of writing, from heartfelt poems to keen observations of nature to deft vignettes about mostly older citizens, some of them written in local dialect.  Mystery, romance, comedy – all forms are in the anthology.  The mountains in Yancey County and up to Tennessee and down to Georgia and west to Cherokee and east to Grandfather Mountain provide the setting for much of the writing.  However, as some of the authors were from “off,” the writing also transports the reader from Paris (Ruth Pope) to New York (Maurice Woodruff) to Oak Park, Illinois (Robert Helmle).  A former mayor of Burnsville, Robert Helmle was a childhood friend of Ernest Hemingway and his memoir “Boyhood Recollections of Ernest Hemingway and His Father,” concludes the anthology. 

            The audience will also learn first-hand what being in the writing group has meant to the four readers.  Poet Pat Riviere-Seel and memoirist Donna Jean Dreyer are both published authors, and Ruth Pope is working on a memoir. 

            Writers or relatives of writers from the anthology are encouraged to contact Susan Larson at 828-765-2652 if they have questions about the event or the book.

 

written by Susan Larson