Way Down Yonder at Cataloochee

It was a perfect day, driving a winding dirt backroad to Cataloochee, North Carolina.  Ol' Catalooch (as I heard it dubbed by the son of a former inhabitant) was once a not-quite-thriving little valley community in what is now part and parcel of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  In the 20s the government bought out the inhabitants and replaced them with elk and pine trees, leaving only a few tattered homes and a handful of invariably white clapboard churches--one each for the Methodists and Presbyterians, and at least two for the Baptists.  Once a year, the Park Service opens up the road to the families of the Cataleeches to have a reunion of sorts, which happened to be this weekend as luck would have it.  

While I was wending my way through hardwoods to How-Green-Was-My-Valley, I flipped the radio on to Prairie Home Companion, which was being broadcast from--wouldn't you guess it--North Carolina.  This is what I heard: