Appalachian Granny Magic

The Appalachian craft is the household magic of the mountain South, formed from English, Scottish and Ulster-Scots settler folklore, from German charm-book material carried down the valley, and from the African American conjure of the same counties. It is largely women's work - the granny woman who doctors, delivers babies and 'talks' a burn, a thrush or a bleed - and it is Christian and Bible-soaked, remembered in the same families that remember the ballads. The folklorists who collected it in the twentieth century were often recording a practice already in decline, and they mixed white and Black informants from the same counties.

The repertoire is domestic and oral: bloodstopping, talking out a burn or a rash, charming warts, blowing or stroking a child's chest for thrush, reading signs and dreams, and protecting the house with salt, with a Bible left open at a psalm, or with a paper carried on the person. Diagnosis is often by the healer's own sense of the case rather than by any instrument, and the cure is a spoken formula, a touched object and a household substance.

This is the tradition of specific families and communities, not a generic 'mountain magic' available to anyone who moves to the hills. The healers were known to their neighbours and licensed by their trust, the charms are Christian prayers addressed to God rather than spells addressed to nature, and the material folklorists collected was given in that relation. Using it as entertainment, or detaching a charm from the community that holds it and the faith that animates it, is a borrowing the tradition itself would not recognise.