During the summer of 1966, I was a student at Peabody Library School in Nashville, Tennessee working on my master's degree. In a class called American Folklore, taught by the renowned professor and author Dr. John E. Brewton, we were given the assignment of gathering stories and other folklore from our home towns.

I called Miss Winnie Walker and asked her if she would retell her stories about Soddy, Tennessee to me. She was excited about my project. I visited her, took a couple of photos of her in her home, and went away with her handwritten stories.

These are the original stories of Miss Winnie Walker, exactly as she wrote them down for me, and accompanied by a few photographs and some folk songs pulled from my own memory. I hope you will enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed putting it together in 1966 and then recreating it into a published work in 2011.