Donna Ray Norton closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and steps to the mic. Out comes a high-pitched warble—a voice that’s part agitated angel, part prophet. Clear and strong, it’s a voice of old—a mournful, mountainous quaver of steep tonal curves navigating songs of heartbreak and hard-won wisdom. As eighth-generation ballad singers from Madison County, North Carolina, Norton and her cousin Melanie Rice are leaders of Nest of Singing Birds, a flock of eight Western North Carolina natives under the wing of Sheila Kay Adams (Rice’s mother and Norton’s aunt) who have been carrying on the time-worn tradition of swapping “songs that come over on the boat,” as Norton calls the narrative tunes that were birthed in the British Isles in the 1600s and accompanied the Scots-Irish settlers of Appalachia.

For nearly two years, the Nest of Singing Birds gathered every month at the Old Marshall Jail, a boutique hotel and restaurant anchoring the picturesque tiny Main Street of Marshall, North Carolina, to take turns sharing, i.e. swapping, the story-songs passed down from their ancestors or learned from old mountain folks. Most sing a capella—a pure distillation of the lonesome tunes—though an occasional fiddle and guitar chime in. These monthly Ballad Swaps were “homages to the traditions of our state, the only state where ballad swaps happen,” says Catherine Swain, head of the North Carolina Music Office in the state’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Locals and tourists attended, and every month the “audience grew and grew. People would be spilling out onto the railroad tracks, even in the winter,” Norton says. “We were gaining momentum.”

Then Hurricane Helene hit. The floods that ravaged Marshall’s tiny downtown inundated the 118-year-old hotel building. The offices of the Madison County Arts Council, a supporter and promoter of the Ballad Swap, were also destroyed. “We lost the one place where we had our voice,” says Norton, who, as a hotel employee and restaurant server, lost two of her sources of income as well.

As Norton joined her devastated community to shovel mud and clear debris, she pondered: How can we as musicians best use our skill set to help rebuild? Prior to the hurricane, Nest of Singing Birds had performed a few times at Rare Bird Farm, a farm and cultural event space in nearby Hot Springs, founded by Charleston, South Carolina, natives Mitchell Davis and Farrah Hoffmire. Norton and Adams had met Davis and Hoffmire when Rare Bird produced a documentary about the music traditions of the Blue Ridge. In a post-hurricane phone conversation with Davis, they hatched the idea to “travel the swap.”

“The ballad tradition is just so raw, powerful, and unique. We love their realness,” Hoffmire says. “And these mountains are the last cradle of it,” Davis adds. So Rare Bird Cultural Arts, the nonprofit arm of Rare Bird Farm, secured grants from the North Carolina Music Office and Madison County Arts Council, and Davis and Hoffmire organized an initial ballad swap show at Asheville’s Grey Eagle, selling out the three-hundred-seat venue, just as they sold out two shows at Charleston’s Hed Hi Studio in February. The Old Marshall Jail Ballad Swap Tour has since traveled to numerous states and venues, including Montreal’s Folk Alliance International Conference, with proceeds from each show going to support post-Helene recovery. “Rare Bird really showed up for their community,” says Norton, whose next tour stop will be Chapel Hill’s Cat’s Cradle on March 30.

Ballad swapping was “a dying tradition” before finding a home at the Old Marshall Jail, notes Norton, and while Helene delt a colossal blow, she and her balladeers, along with Rare Bird Farm, are as determined as ever to keep one of the country’s oldest unbroken oral traditions alive and breathing. “By traveling the swap, we hope to keep doing what we love and keep our momentum, while also reminding people that our region is still recovering, and we need people to visit our areas,” Norton says. Once the Old Marshall Jail re-opens (tentatively this April), people can do just that, and hear the old ballads sung, swapped, and soaring in their mountain home once again.