She remembers one particular\u00a0visit her great-aunt paid to her dad’s house when she was a young child. Her great-aunt was filing her nails on the couch as her dad did dishes in the other room, and\u00a0Avalon, who’d been crawling around the floor, started rummaging through her great-aunt’s purse.<\/p>\n
“And she yells at my dad, she goes, ‘Jim, you gotta keep that baby away from my purse, I’ve got a loaded pistol in there,'” Avalon recounts,\u00a0dialing up her normally subtle Georgia drawl. “My dad runs in with there with soapy hands and picks me up as I’m grabbing a pistol.”<\/p>\n
Avalon describes the women in her family as “protected” \u2014 by their guns, and maybe by something even more powerful, too.<\/p>\n
“They’re not witchy, they don’t do ceremonies or spells, but if they believe something in their heart, and they wish and will that it’s going to happen, it’s very likely going to happen,” she explains. “Being on the bad side of the women in my family is something that all the men try very much not to do.”<\/p>\n
Talk to Southern and Appalachian families and you’ll realize that Avalon’s story of a witchy bloodline isn’t uncommon. Though it’s not often talked about in country music lyrics, it’s an important piece of rural Southern lore, and\u00a0a strong through line on the tracks of\u00a0Pink Pocket Pistol<\/em>.<\/p>\n The title track is an intoxicating, cool-headed revenge anthem, but another song \u2014 “Hex” \u2014 is even more explicitly witchy.<\/p>\n “I have put on a hex and I hope he feels it every day of his life,” Avalon says. “The hex wasn’t anything, like, deadly. I just hoped that he stubbed his little toe every time he wakes up in the morning.”<\/p>\n