By Lisa A. DuBois

In 1993, Nashville producers Jeff Ellis and Stuart Bivin presented “Divas,” a benefit concert for down-on-their-luck actors starring a foursome of popular local theater personalities. For the most part, the featured performers offered lively revues of contemporary songs and show tunes. At the end of the first act, actress Carol Ponder stepped forth, introducing herself with self-deprecating humor as the “down-home, clutching-her-heart, folk-singing Diva.”

To everyone’s surprise, she quickly burst into a set of traditional Appalachian ballads. With little fanfare, she then put her guitar aside and belted out, a cappella, “Pretty Bird.” As she stood tall and solitary, her voice—ornamented with yips and trills birthed in the hills and hollers of the Southern backwoods—rang loud and clear and pure throughout the auditorium. When the theater lights came up, the audience was still recovering.

“I knew she’d pack an emotional wallop,” says Ellis. “Carol is unique among Nashville performers. I’ve had people tell me that that night Carol Ponder became their favorite singer.”

In early October, Ponder will release her first CD, Pretty Bird (Cove Struck Music), a mixture of ancient and contemporary a cappella ballads in “the Southern mountain tradition.” For someone trained and educated in legitimate music, she couldn’t have chosen a less commercial project. But for someone whose ancestry is deeply rooted in Appalachia, she couldn’t have found an easier route home.

“I don’t want to sound like the sap that ate New York, but I was entirely motivated by love and art,” Ponder says. “But now I’m being driven by compulsion. Doing this CD was a huge relief because I’ve had a hunger to get re-engaged with this music. It’s not like I have a choice. It’s pulling me. Singing it a cappella is at the heart and guts and center of it, and it always has been.”

According to professor Charles Wolfe, an expert in folk musicology at Middle Tennessee State University, Ponder’s organic understanding of the tradition is extraordinary. The United States has a nonpareil musical culture that flourished in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina, protected by the region’s isolation and inaccessibility. Balladeers often sang in social settings to enrich mundane group activities like quilting or snapping beans. Although, like Ponder, many of the musicians could also play guitar and banjo, they’d set their instruments down to sing tunes that required particular vocal ornamentation and dramatization. Favorite singers emerged—among them Almeda Riddle, Doug and Jack Wallen, and Hamper McBee—who interpreted centuries-old ballads with their own unique stamp of pacing, slurs, and glottal breaks.

Several songs on the Pretty Bird CD demonstrate Ponder’s mastery of “feathering,” a technique in which the singer reaches the last syllable of a verse, drags the sound up to a higher pitch, then sends it off into oblivion. Today, as the elderly purveyors of the genre die off, the nation is in danger of losing this unique sound.

“There are virtually no traditional unaccompanied ballad singers left,” Dr. Wolfe claims. “This is almost an extinct art form. To listen to Carol do an album of unaccompanied music—that’s a leap of faith to people who’ve never heard this in their lives. But for people like me, it’s like finding the Grail.”

It’s not completely accurate to say the album is totally without instrumentation—on one song Ponder does accompany herself by playing spoons.

Born in Ashville, N.C., she belongs to the second generation of people in her family who are “past that”—raised in a more cosmopolitan area. At home, her well-educated parents exposed their three daughters to Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Dvorak, Rodgers and Hammerstein. But when the Ponders sang together—at family gatherings and on local stages around town—they looked to their past, performing such tunes as “Black Jack Davy” and “The Cherry Riddle,” ancient ballads steeped in mountain lore.

Her uncle was Hubert Hayes, who in 1949 founded the Mountain Youth Jamboree, having scoured the coves and hillsides to find talented musicians and bring them into town. Anne, the oldest of the three sisters and now a college president, became involved in the late 1960s folk revival and taught Carol her repertoire, which included songs passed down from their ancestors. One such song, “Alberta,” appears on the CD.

While a student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Ponder created for herself a parallel universe, privately perfecting the cadence of her heritage while also professionally immersing herself in theater. In 1985, she and her husband, Robert Keifer, moved to Nashville, where Ponder is a teaching artist for the Nashville Institute for the Arts and has become a marquee name at Tennessee Repertory Theatre, Nashville Children’s Theatre, and Chaffin’s Barn. In fact, the “Divas” concert five years ago was the first time most of her local fans had ever been exposed to her “other side.” And they were thunderstruck.

Local musician Victor Mecyssne, a longtime friend, produced the Pretty Bird album. “The first time I heard her sing ‘Alberta,’ ” he remembers, “I thought, ‘We gotta get this down. We’ve got to preserve this.’ It’s rare and it’s precious. There’s a gazillion folksingers out there, myself included, [Dave] Olney included. But all Carol needs is a microphone. I’m encouraging her to mine that vein.”

In addition to such traditional folk songs as “Tales of the Airl’y Days,” “Wondrous Love,” and “Omie Wise,” Ponder has included on the CD “The Hickman Boys (or The Downfall of Fort Donelson),” a Civil War ballad that has never before been recorded.

She has also opened up a forum for contemporary songwriters who’ve delved into the a cappella tradition. Tom Mitchell’s “Camp Hambone,” Si Kahn’s “Memorial,” Mike Reid’s “Barren Woman,” and Dave Olney’s “Ain’t It That Way,” all featured on the CD, adhere to the Southern mountain musical faith.

Perhaps most important among the modern selections is the title track, composed by folk activist Hazel Dickens. In many ways, this song has become Ponder’s emblem. On the one hand, the ballad necessitates and showcases the singer’s vocal acrobatics. On the other, it is nothing more than the tender observation of a young girl torn between staying in the mountains she loves and finding freedom beyond them. When Ponder sings “Pretty Bird,” the genetically ingrained hitch in her voice surfaces as naturally as the story she has to tell.

Carol Ponder will appear 9 p.m. Sept. 26 at Bongo Java, 2007 Belmont Blvd. $5 cover; call 385-5282 for info. She’ll also perform 8 p.m. Nov. 6 at the Spring Hill Arts Center, located in the old Spring Hill High School, 1220 School Rd. Tickets are $3; call 302-0248 for info. Upon release of the Pretty Bird CD, selections can be heard via the Internet at http://songs.com/carolponder.

Carol Ponder will appear 9 p.m. Sept. 26 at Bongo Java, 2007 Belmont Blvd. $5 cover; call 385-5282 for info. She’ll also perform 8 p.m. Nov. 6 at the Spring Hill Arts Center, located in the old Spring Hill High School, 1220 School Rd. Tickets are $3; call 302-0248 for info. Upon release of the Pretty Bird CD, selections can be heard via the Internet at http://songs.com/carolponder.