Patty Kowing

Cumberland Music: a Kind-hearted Frolic Through the Haunted Kentucky Mountains Patty Kowing

I grew up on the tales I heard around my Grandma Frank's kitchen, of life in Kentucky, as told by my mother, Nora, Aunt Lucille, Aunt Annie, Cousin Etta and Grandma. They told ghost stories about Indian princesses and big stallions, funny stories about the big ol' sway back white horse, Dollar. Scary stories, told by the kids as they walked to school, about the wolves following them on the edge of the woods. They fed them biscuits from their shortening can lunch buckets, thinking they were dogs. Stories of fireballs racing through the house at night. Little people, romance, magic, herbs, medicine men and women, witches and Indian kidnappings. I didn't want these stories to be forgotten so I wrote 'The Cumberland Witch' for my grandchildren. But there were so many stories that I couldn't fit into the novel that I began a sequel, 'Cumberland Music'. I named the heroine Music for the 105-year-od midwife that delivered my father in 1912, one week after the Titanic sank.