John the Balladeer by Manly Wade Wellman
John the Balladeer is a fictional character from a series of stories featuring his encounters with supernatural and human evils, primarily published from the 1950s through the 1980s. The character is notable for using his Christian faith and the music from his silver-stringed guitar to confront and often defeat various malevolent forces. Central to the narratives is the recurring theme that practitioners of evil fear silver, symbolized through John's guitar.
In the stories, John faces a range of adversaries, including a giant bird created by a hoodoo man, greedy individuals, and even a sorcerer intent on seduction. Each tale showcases John's resilience and moral integrity as he uses his music and quick thinking to overcome challenges, such as scaring off evil ghosts or thwarting malevolent spirits. Some stories also touch on themes of redemption and self-reflection, as seen when he helps individuals confront their fears.
The collection includes works like “O Ugly Bird!” and “The Desrick on Yandro,” contributing to a rich tapestry of folklore and moral lessons. John’s character serves as a bridge between the mundane and the mystical, embodying the struggle against darkness through faith, compassion, and the power of music.
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John the Balladeer
First published: 1988
Type of work: Stories
Type of plot: Fantasy—Magical Realism
Time of work: The twentieth century
Locale: The American South
The Plot
The first eleven stories included in John the Balladeer were published originally in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1951 and 1958, then collected in Who Fears the Devil? (1963). Other stories in the collection were first published between 1979 and 1987.
In these stories, John describes encounters with some sort of supernatural evil and how he defeated it, or at least survived when human evildoers were killed, because of his pure heart, his Christian faith, and the songs he plays on his silver-stringed guitar. (The practitioners of evil hate and fear silver.) “O Ugly Bird!” features a huge, malevolent bird created by the hoodoo man Mr. Onselm. John smites the bird with his silver-stringed guitar, killing it, and Mr. Onselm dies when the bird does. In “The Desrick on Yandro,” Mr. Yandro, a selfish rich man, is summoned to the mountain that bears his name. Various creatures that he refuses to believe in kill him. In “Vandy,” Vandy, a 280-year-old sorcerer wants to seduce a young woman. John foils him by tossing a silver quarter into the fire, summoning the sorcerer’s old adversary, George Washington. “One Other” is a sinister creature with one arm and one leg. A witch summons him to cast a love spell on John, but John scares him off with Christian music. In “Call Me from the Valley,” John uses his music to scare off an evil ghost, thus allowing the spirits of two long-dead star-crossed lovers to be reunited.
The Little Black Train is a song about a train to Hell. John sings it to a woman who fears that just such a train is coming for her. He uses the Doppler effect, first raising the pitch to simulate the approach of the train, then lowering it to make the train go away. The woman resolves to mend her ways.
In “Shiver in the Pines,” four men purchase a map that is supposed to lead them to treasure, and a monster threatens them as they approach. Here the menace is not supernatural. John unmasks the “monster” as the man who had sold the map, in cahoots with one of the four. In “Walk Like a Mountain,” John encounters the eight-foot-tall descendant of the Giants mentioned in Genesis and persuades him not to call down a storm to destroy his normal-sized neighbors. In “On the Hills and Everywhere,” John recounts his meeting with a benevolent carpenter who may have been Jesus. In “Nine Yards of Other Cloth,” John encounters his old love Evadare and rescues her from an evildoer.
Wonder as I Wander and “Farther Down the Trail” are small collections of vignettes. In “Trill Costers Burden,” Evadare offers to take upon herself the burden of a dead womans sins. Another woman offers Evadare jewels in an effort to take John away from her, but Evadare refuses the jewels and John refuses the woman. At the conclusion of the story, John and Evadare marry, but Evadare does not appear in the remaining five stories.
In “The Spring,” John saves the owner of a healing spring from a woman who would use its waters for evil. In “Owls Hoot in the Daytime,” John defeats a demon, and in “Can These Bones Live,” an animated skeleton. In “Nobody Ever Goes There,” the only third-person story in the book, readers see him through the eyes of a family he helps. In “Where Did She Wander?” there is yet another undead evil woman from the past.