In the blog below about Tony Bourdain's visit to New Orleans last week, I mentioned a series of books by James Lee Burke about Cajun detective Dave Robichaux, and specifically one of the books, IN THE ELECTRIC MIST WITH CONFEDERATE DEAD.

Imagine my surprise when I read just yesterday that this year's Oscar nominee Tommy Lee Jones (NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN) will star in a film version of that novel called simply IN THE ELECTRIC MIST.

To the best of my knowledge, the only previous film based on a Robichaux book starred Alec Baldwin, back in his younger days. Too pretty by half. Jones, though, has the craggy, weary, nothing-can-surprise-me-anymore sort of face I associate with Robichaux, and he's a fine actor to boot. This one oughta be good.

Have a good day. Snow here; just enough to leave a lacy skift on the grass and thin blankets on fenceposts and the like, not enough to close school though. Otherwise cold and cloudy and damp; there was rain last night before the temps fell and brought the snow. Till next time fair thee well.

Not a good day today. Words that should have been left unsaid--or, in the case of email, unsent--a cold wind, dark clouds that do not rain, no matter how threateningly navy blue they get--tired, irritable, bored--the relevant words in French would be malaise or ennui--both teetering on being the eighth deadly sin.

We regard castles as places of romance. Who hasn't imagined being in an Arthurian romance, with the fair lady looking down from the tower as her knightly true love fights off evil barons or dragons or waves goodbye as he goes off on some quest or other? How long could she wait faithfully for the knight's return?

Castles were not built for romance, unfortunately. Their original purpose was, pure and simple, military defense. Castles always had a garrison of soldiers and many times the entire population of the surrounding villages and countryside would take shelter within their vast stone walls. Some of the best preserved ones are in Wales, that mountainous section of Britain where the natives revolted against the crown--particularly during the rule of the redoubtable Edward I (1272-1307)--over and over again in the medieval period--and they are not romantic; he was a warrior king, and romance was far from on his mind as he built the strongholds and garrisoned them with the intent of preventing more uprisings by such great Welsh rebels as Llewelyn the Great, and later, Owain Glyndwr. His ploy succeeded; Llewelyn died in battle and Owain Glyndwr died in England in his bed, old and forgotten, in his daughter's Hertfordshire home. Such romance as reposed in Edward I's soul was expended in the Eleanor crosses that he built as memorials for his beloved wife, Eleanor of Castile, after her death in 1290.

No matter. I want a hiding place today, and the thick stone walls of a castle (some as thick as twenty to twenty-four feet) sound like a good place. Up in a tower, perhaps in a narrow Gothic window overlooking the moat. Don't know if I'm waiting for a knight's return or for a siege to begin or a battle to break out under the walls; do know that it's probably a drafty old pile and there aren't all that many comforts around, but I can dream. Maybe there's even a ghost or two to keep me company; castles are notoriously haunted places.



Sorry to be so incoherent; I'm feeling sorry for myself today.

Till next time, fair thee well.

Ghost lights are a staple of folklore. I've already covered them once in an earlier blog about lights that haunt train tracks, and are usually associated with some tragedy. Other ghost lights are more anomalous. Some may have their origin in legends from the Old World; the story of Jack o'Lantern is one such.

Geographically, other than a light that once haunted a cemetery about a half-mile from the house, the closest ones to my hometown appear on North Carolina's fabled Brown Mountain. There are two origin legends that account for these dancing multicolored lights, which no amount of scientific study has managed to debunk. One says the lights represent spirits of Cherokee maidens, searching for husbands and lovers on who died in a battle on Brown Mountain in the year 1200. Another dates their origin to the year 1850, when the lights were seen during a search for a local woman who had disappeared on the mountain. Her body was eventually located at the base of a cliff, and it is believed she was murdered by her abusive husband. Other sources say the lights are mentioned in documents dating to the 1770s.

The Brown Mountain Lights appear most often on summer evenings. Skeptics have blamed swamp gas, foxfire (the phosphorescent gleam that shows up on rotting wood), pitchblende (a radioactive metallic element), and headlights for the phenomena, but none of these explanations have gained widespread acceptance.

About a quarter century ago, I heard a song called "Brown Mountain Light" for the first time. Written by the great country songwriter "Skyland Scotty" Wiseman, it was recorded by the Kingston Trio, but the version I learned was recorded by the Country Gentlemen in 1966, on their album BRINGING MARY HOME. The song revolves around a southern plantation owner who vanished while hunting in the Brown Mountain area. His slave came searching for him, but was lost too; the light is explained away as the slave still "searching for his master who's long gone on."

Nice story--except that nowhere could I locate any account in North Carolina folklore that links Brown Mountain to a lost hunter and his faithful body servant.

It would be twenty years or more before I located what I believe to be Scotty Wiseman's source material. It's a story about another light entirely: the Cole Mountain Light in the area of Mooresville, West Virginia.

The Cole Mountain Light origin story was originally collected by the great West Virginia folklorist Ruth Ann Musick, and retold by Michael Norman and Beth Scott in their book HAUNTED HERITAGE (2002). The story begins in the 1850s, when a planter named Charles Jones came to Cole Mountain on a raccoon hunt. Jones vanished into thin air on the mountain; his slave and others searched for his body for a week before they gave up. On the one-year anniversary of Jones's disappearance, it's said, the slave renewed the search, but he also vanished without a trace. The light began to appear shortly after the slave vanished, and it is said that it is the lantern the slave carried when he went on his second and doomed search for Charles Jones.

This is purely speculation on my part, but I suspect that Scotty Wiseman heard or read the legend of the Cole Mountain Light and was inspired to write a song about it, but moved the location to Brown Mountain. Brown Mountain is internationally famous; Cole Mountain, for all that its story is equally as interesting as Brown Mountain's, is not.

If you have a chance, seek out "Brown Mountain Light." It's some great bluegrass, as performed by the Country Gentlemen. Just remember it's not really about Brown Mountain, but about a lesser known mountain a couple hundred miles up the road. And until next time, fair thee well.

Check out the comments below. Whit was kind enough to download some YouTube video for me, including the Country Gentlemen performing "Brown Mountain Light." Thanks a bunch, Whit!

Good evening, bloggers! Please allow the frustrated country music historian in me to debate with the ghost story buff on the origins of a song about a ghost. (No yawns till the end--I'll know cause I'll start yawning too! Those suckers are catching!)

Ahem. In 1967 the late Woodrow Wilson "Red" Sovine (1917-1980) released what is arguably his greatest hit: the recitation "Phantom 309." It tells the story of a hitchhiker who gets a ride from a trucker named Big Joe one cold rainy night. Joe takes him as far as a diner in a small town and gives him a dime for coffee before driving off into the darkness and vanishing from sight. At the diner, when the hitchhiker mentions Big Joe, the manager tells him that Big Joe and his truck--the aptly named Phantom 309--are ghosts. Ten years earlier, Big Joe had topped a nearby hill to find a school bus stopped in front of him; rather than hit the bus, he turned the truck off the road. In the ensuing crash Big Joe died and his beloved truck was destroyed. In life Big Joe had picked up hitchhikers and helped them on their way; in death he's no different. The manager tells the hitchhiker his coffee's on the house, and as for the dime, "keep it as a souvenir/From Big Joe and the Phantom 309."

I've always loved this song; it plays to Red Sovine's strength at recitations (he was affirmatively not the best singer ever to hit Nashville), and it's an outstanding example in a small number of country and bluegrass songs that deal with the supernatural.

Fast forward to 2004. In her book GHOSTS AMONG US, Leslie Rule recounts an item from an April 2002 edition of the Halifax, Nova Scotia DAILY NEWS. According to the item, hitchhikers around Halifax's Waverly Road have been reporting for some four decades that they have gotten lifts from a trucker called Joe (his truck has no name, apparently), who has been dead for many years.

Coincidentally, the period 1967-2007 spans precisely four decades. But here's where the chicken or the egg conundrum comes in: was Red Sovine inspired by Nova Scotian folklore to write "Phantom 309" or did "Phantom 309" inspire Nova Scotian folklore?

I have a copy of what may be the best-known collection of Nova Scotian ghost stories in my personal library: Helen Creighton's BLUENOSE GHOSTS (1957). These stories do not include a phantom trucker; most of them deal with ghosts from the sea and date back many decades before "Phantom 309." If Red Sovine was inspired by folklore, he didn't find it there.

Red Sovine's fellow country star, singer Hank Snow, was a native Nova Scotian, but Snow had permanently relocated to the United States some two decades before the earliest reports of the ghostly Halifax trucker, so it seems unlikely that he told Sovine such a story.

There are several accounts online (thanks Willard) that insist that the stories in Nova Scotia predate "Phantom 309" but these reports are so vague as to dates for the earliest sighting of Big Joe as to be virtually worthless to the serious researcher.

So which DID come first: the chicken or the egg?

Big Joe has much in common with a story from 1940s Newfoundland regarding a ghostly moonshiner called Smoker who rescues people lost in the snow to expiate his sins. I suspect Big Joe also lurks at the back of David Allan Coe's "The Ride," in which the ghost of Hank Williams gives a hitchhiker a ride to Nashville. All in all, though, whether he was a ghost first, or whether he's a character from a song who became a ghostlore figure, Big Joe sounds like a man worth knowing.

Till next time, fair thee well.

Theoretically I should not be a fan of Anthony Bourdain, chef/author/host of Travel Channel's NO RESERVATIONS. For one thing, I'm not a "foodie." Swear it's true, I have always said that as long as there's a tin can in the world, I will not starve to death; and even with tin cans, I'm a lousy cook. Then there is the undeniable fact that Tony Bourdain is a snide, snarky, cynical, cranky son of a bitch (I can say that because he says as much himself). Oughtn't to be my cup of tea at all. But Monday nights at 10 PM, here I am, snack in hand, breathlessly watching as Bourdain does a chef's crawl of food venues in some truly breathtaking locales.

This past Monday night, he went to New Orleans. And in the midst of making the rounds of such redoubtable eating establishments as Antoine's and Emeril's and mourning the dreadful loss of much of the Big Easy's tourist trade following the devastation left in Hurricane Katrina's wake, he went down to the Lower Ninth Ward.

The Lower Ninth Ward, you will remember, was left essentially depopulated. We'll never know for certain, I suspect, how many died there. It's a ghost town, for what that loaded term is worth. It reminded me, watching Bourdain and his guide walk through there, of a song about quite another type of ghost town, by C.W. McCall:

Once there was laughter, and once there was life. . .

As another part of that lyric says, there once was also singing and song; many musicians lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, as did chefs, sous chefs, waiters and the like from the restaurant world. Now there is street after street of abandoned houses. Some are still standing but are windowless; others are mere piles of rubble. There are weeds in some areas as high as a tall man's waist (and Tony looks to be quite a tall man). On many of the houses, you can still see the painted X's and numbers where the houses were checked for survivors by rescue personnel; many of them show more dead were located than living. It's eerily silent, except for the wind that moans through the deserted houses.

And it occurred to me that New Orleans, always a top contender for America's most haunted city among those of us who love a good ghost story, has a whole plethora of new ghosts. They drowned, they died under collapsed buildings, they died of thirst and lack of medical care. And, like their famous counterparts from other eras--the great voodoo queen Marie Laveau, the infamous Madame LaLaurie, sad octoroon Julie who froze to death for love--they are bound to the city they loved.

Maybe we can't see them yet, but I'll bet there are those who can hear their voices on the winds and in the bayous, around Lake Pontchartrain, maybe even in the Superdome.

One of my favorite writers is James Lee Burke, who writes a series of novels about a Cajun deputy sheriff called Dave Robichaux. Many of the Robichaux stories are set in and around New Orleans and New Iberia. In fact, the first one of the Robichaux books I read was IN THE ELECTRIC MIST WITH CONFEDERATE DEAD, which was a sort of ghost story; the Confederate general John Bell Hood, who died in an 1879 yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans, makes an appearance.

I've never been to New Orleans; time and circumstance haven't permitted. One day I hope to get there, though, and I'll be watching and listening for the ghosts. They're there. They always will be.