Welcome to the Smoky Mountain Suite, which is devoted to the collections made by Joseph Sargent Hall (1906-1992).  You'll find the voices of sixty or so people he recorded in 1939 -- and not just their stories and thoughts, but a taste of their music as well. You'll also find an article about him and an interview with him about his early work.  You'll find the interviews and stories he recorded in 1939—about ten hours of recordings of people born from 1844 to 1921, along with very careful transcriptions of them.  You can listen first or you can read along while you listen or you can just read. The Glossary is a mini-dictionary to accompany the Hall recordings.  Clicking on any term highlighted in a transcript will take you to an entry there having additional quotations and other information about that term. 

• Joseph Sargent Hall
  Here you will find an article detailing the life and contributions of the pioneer researcher of the speech of the Great Smoky Mountains. You will also find an interview with Hall in 1990, as he reminisces about his early visits to the Smokies in the late 1930s.
  
  

• Old-Time Smoky Mountain Music
  Though Joseph Hall went to the Smokies to record traditional speech of the Smokies, he found himself befriending many young amateur musicians who prevailed on him to record their singing and playing. The result was more than eighty disk recordings of them that for decades lay untouched in the Library of Congress. In 2010 the Great Smoky Mountains Association produced a CD of the thirty-four best selections, Old-Time Smoky Mountain Music, which in 2013 was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Historical Album category.
  
  

• Hall Speakers and Transcripts
  Here you will find the voices of the sixty-odd people Joseph Hall recorded in 1939, along with biographical details about each one and a very close transcription of what they say.  Listen as great bear hunters tell about their chases and old-timers recount their encounters with panthers. In each transcript, many terms have been highlighted and  linked to the Glossary (see below).
  
  

• Glossary for Hall Transcripts
  In this section you will find a detailed glossary of four hundred words and phrases found in Joseph Hall's 1939 interviews. Each entry provides the part of speech, the definition, notes about the historical origin or geographical prevalence, and quotations from other Appalachian sources that illustrate the term.