Location: NC Hwy 208 near Tweed Farm Rd., Madison.
County: Madison
Original Date Cast: 2025
Mary Bullman was born on April 8, 1872, in the Laurel section of Madison County, North Carolina. In 1892, Mary Bullman married James Monroe Sands who had moved to Madison County from Danville, Virginia. Together, they had ten children. Mary had been a prolific singer all her life and was often referred to as "Singing Mary” by those who knew her. The songs she often sang for friends and family were mostly old ballads that came into existence centuries before in the British Isles and were passed down through many generations of singers. Mary traditionally sang the ballads, unaccompanied and from memory.
How Mary learned these songs is a matter of speculation, but it’s been assumed that she learned them from her mother, Rosannah Bullman, whose ancestors had emigrated from the British Isles. Before marrying John Wesley Bullman, Mary’s father, Rosannah had been married to Hugh Wallin, who was killed in the U.S. Civil War. Many of their children, Mary’s half-brothers, and their descendants have also been well-known as singers of the traditional old ballads.
On July 31, 1916, Mary Sands met English folklorist and traditional music collector Cecil J. Sharp near her home in Madison County and began singing for him the first of 25 old English ballads and folk songs over the next 5 days. At the time, Mary was 44 years old and 8 ½ months pregnant with her tenth child.
In 1915, Cecil J. Sharp became a renowned authority on the history of folk songs and dances in England. That year, as he was touring America as a dance advisor for a stage production, he was approached by Mrs. Olive Dame Campbell, a folk song collector, originally from Medford, MA. She convinced him that the inhabitants of the Southern Appalachians were still singing the traditional songs and ballads that their English and Scottish ancestors had brought over with them when they immigrated in the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sharp had concluded that no one in England was singing them anymore, and was not aware that they were still being preserved in America by the people of the Southern Appalachian Mountains.
In 1917, Sharp published his book English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, comprised of 122 ballads and other songs, including 39 that had been collected by Olive Dame Campbell prior to Sharp's arrival in America. Included also were 23 songs collected from Mary Sands. Sharp died in 1924, but in 1932, a more complete and larger edition of his book was published posthumously. It included all the songs in the 1917 edition, plus 152 more songs. In total, he collected 25 songs from Mary, with 2 not included in either edition.
Some of the North Carolina traditional ballad singers – currently living or have passed on - who have performed in public or produced music albums using the songs sung by Mary Sands or have been inspired by her legacy are Sheila Kay Adams, Joe Penland, Donna Ray Norton, Bobby McMillon, Bill Morris, Jerry Adams, Betty Smith, Doug Wallin, Jack Wallin, Lee Wallin, Cas Wallin, Inez Chandler, Berzilla Wallin, Dellie Norton, Dillard Chandler, and many others that may be lesser known. The most recent, as of this writing, has been the album by Nashville-based musician Thomm Jutz and English musician Martin Simpson entitled Nothing but Green Willow, the Songs of Mary Sands and Jane Gentry. “Nothing but green willow” is a line from one of Mary’s songs, “Awake! Awake!”
References:
“A Nest of Singing Birds.” Accessed February 25, 2025. https://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/m_sands.htm.
Campbell, Olive Dame, and Cecil James Sharp. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York and London : G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1917.
English Folk Dance and Song Society. “Cecil Sharp Diary 1916,” July 17, 2017. https://www.efdss.org/vwml-digitised-resources/cecil-sharps-appalachian….
Smith, Betty N. Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2015.