2019 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People Honor Book 2019 Jefferson Cup Award Honor Book for Young Readers The Best Children's Books of the Year 2019, Bank Street College STARRED REVIEW! "Beautiful and intelligent historical fiction in the vein of Christopher Paul Curtis, Vince Vawter, and Mildred D. Taylor. A must-have for school and public library collections." ―School Library Journal starred review Nate's family has a secret, and it's wrapped up in a song. The problem is, his preacher father hates music, and when he catches Nate hanging around downtown Bristol with musicians like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, he comes down hard on him. So Nate sets out in search of himself and the song he thinks will heal his family. Set during the "big bang" of country music in the late 1920s, Nate's journey of self-discovery parallels that of a region finding its voice for the first time. 2019 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People Honor Book 2019 Jefferson Cup Award Honor Book for Young Readers The Best Children's Books of the Year 2019, Bank Street College "The real history melds seamlessly with Nate's family story, and the emotions ring true through the hopeful but bittersweet end. A solid, worthwhile read. " ―Kirkus Reviews STARRED REVIEW! "Beautiful and intelligent historical fiction in the vein of Christopher Paul Curtis, Vince Vawter, and Mildred D. Taylor. A must-have for school and public library collections." ―School Library Journal starred review "This is a beautiful book, a tale of music, mountains and mystery spun by a master storyteller. Ronald Kidd takes us on a fascinating and fast-paced journey through the hills of 1920s East Tennessee, where a boy becomes lost in country music as he makes discoveries about himself, his family, and his community. Lord of the Mountain pleases like an old-time melody, a lyrical adventure with surprises and meaning at every turn."―Andrew Maraniss, author of Strong Inside Ronald Kidd is the author of fourteen novels for young readers, including the highly acclaimed Night on Fire and Monkey Town: The Summer of the Scopes Trial. His novels of adventure, comedy, and mystery have received the Children's Choice Award, an Edgar Award nomination, and honors from the American Library Association, the International Reading Association, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library. He is a two-time O’Neill playwright who lives in Tennessee. Lord of the Mountain By Ronald Kidd Albert Whitman & Company Copyright © 2018 Ronald Kidd All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8075-4751-9 CHAPTER 1 Mr. Fowler was barking again. It was loud and frenzied, like you'd get if you teased a bulldog or yanked a Doberman's chain. Mr. Fowler was a large man, and when the spirit moved, he would dance and quiver and get circles of sweat under his arms. If the night was warm and the moon was just right, he would bark. It wasn't so unusual, really. Mr. Bunn hopped. Mrs. Greeley chirped like a bird. Constance Carpenter, a girl not much older than me, babbled in a language no one had ever heard, except for those of us who showed up every Saturday night at the Church of Consecrated Heaven and Satan's on the Run. Does that sound crazy to you? It did to me. The whole thing — the barking, the babbling, the hopping, the church itself, if you could call it that — had sprung, fully formed, from Daddy's head into the world. It was as if he had reached inside, grabbed the twisted part, and held it up, writhing and sputtering, for everyone to see. And the people had come. Of course, they might never have known it was a church if it hadn't been for the sign, made by my father in a fit of holy painting. Put plainly, it was a tent. Daddy had spotted the tent in a catalog, placed a phone call, and a few weeks later, a truck backed up to our house and unloaded a wooden crate bigger than my room. Daddy paid the driver with what I later found out was the last of our savings. Then he got a crowbar and a couple of hammers, and the two of us set upon the crate. By the end of the day, using printed instructions and the occasional shouted tip from my little brother, Arnie, we had put up the tent in the empty lot next to our house. That evening, as the sun set, Daddy called Mama, and the four of us stood at the entrance while he prayed. This wasn't one of your sentence prayers, or even paragraph or chapter. It was a volume prayer, one you could set right up next to A–Z in Collier's Encyclopedia. He prayed us up and down, back and forth, in and out. He started at the beginning, which for him was the typhoid fever that had descended like Moses's locusts one terrible day and carried my big sister, named Sister, off to heaven. We had lived in North Carolina at the time, in a town called Deep Gap, but I didn't remember any of it since I was barely two years old. Even so, that day was fresh in my mind because Daddy talked about it