Adams performs ballads from English, Scottish, and Irish traditions as she learned them from her ancestors, as well as innovating other tunes with a signature drop-thumb clawhammer style on the five-string banjo, an ability which has won her recognition and awards.

[2] Adams has been a regular performer with "A Swannanoa Solstice" in Asheville, North Carolina, alongside such artists as Al Petteway, Amy White, and Robin Bullock.

[10] Adams performs and teaches regularly at the Swannanoa Gathering, a series of week-long workshops in various folk arts held in July and August on the campus of Warren Wilson College, near Asheville, North Carolina.

[11] The book was praised as "pure mountain magic" by Life magazine and was a winner of the 1997 Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award, North Carolina Society of Historians.

[13] It was a finalist for the SIBA Book Award[14] and praised by Kirkus Reviews as "Deeply satisfying storytelling propelled by the desires of full-bodied, prickly characters set against a landscape rendered in all its beauty and harshness.