Come Go Home with Me

September 11, 1995
The only thing slightly piquant about these sappy reminiscences is their location: a little place called Sodom. It's not the interesting Sodom though, but a remote mountain town in North Carolina. It does, however, allow for the odd amusing lines, as when an elderly resident hops out of the car upon returning home and declares ``God bless old Sodom!'' Adams is an Appalachian balladeer and storyteller, and a few of these bits charm with their insight into country ways--particularly the first, a brief memory of the day Adams and ``Granny'' served as landing area for a multitude of butterflies. But, as a whole, they are hokey. Most of the stories center around family: her maternal grandfather, ``Breaddaddy,'' tells a story about an Indian girl who ``was really purty''; in another story, she and Breaddaddy witness a Christmas miracle when the animals in the barn kneel down at midnight. Even illicit behavior comes off cute here. The stories are arranged in roughly chronological order, so Adams progresses from spray-painting a cat to hanging out at the ``Chat Pile'' with other teenagers passing around moonshine and beer. Adams writes in a style best described as self-deprecatingly hillbilly. She can't help winking at her audience when recalling how, as a fresh-faced college student, a professor once asked her to sing a ballad ``a cappella'' and she asked him to ``talk out the first line of this Acappella or at least tell me how the story goes, I might very well know it by another name.''