The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash

This novel won the Southern Book Award in Literary Fiction for 2017 and was named a Best Book of 2017 by both the American Library Association and the Chicago Public Library.  Cash’s debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, was a New York Times best-seller. This, his third novel, The Last Ballad, centers on the life and murder of Ella May Wiggins (1900-1929) a ballad singer from the Smoky Mountains who worked at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, and lived in a predominantly African-American neighborhood called Stumptown. Two of her seven children died of malnutrition, and she became active in the National Textile Workers Union, where she was an advocate for equality for women and African-Americans. She composed and sang ballads to tell the stories of union struggles.  On September 14, 1929, she was shot to death by company men. She was pregnant at the time she was shot, and her children ranged in age from eleven years to one year old. Wiley Cash was actually born and raised i