Ross Ballard

Unique traits: Over 200 unique voiced characters. Owner Mountain Whispers Studio high atop Rouse Mountain in Morgan County WV.

• Mountain Whispers Audio books
• Studio

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  Screaming with the Cannibals (2014)
  Voice-over by MountainWhispers.com Audiobooks / Ross Ballard (Drama) 64 Characters Voiced Jesse is back in this sequel to Maynard�s Crum, but he�s moved beyond scraping together a life in small town West Virginia. Instead, Jesse�s slowly making his was south, eventually finding himself as a lifeguard on a beach in South Carolina, where the local sheriff wants to do him harm, if his ex-girlfriend doesn�t get to him first. Ross Ballard II perfectly captures Jesse with a twang in his voice and a good mixture of solemn and absurd voices for the book�s characters. This production includes musical interludes and sound effects that immerse the listener in the audio experience. A bonus disc accompanies this audio edition: a 15-song soundtrack of music inspired by Maynard�s series from Pops Walker.

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  Crum The Novel (2010)
  Drama by MountainWhispers.com Audiobooks / Ross Ballard (Drama) 47 characters voiced Like lots of eighteen-year-olds, the boy at the center of Crum doesn't know where he's going, but he knows he is leaving. This novel, named after a real-life, gritty little coal town on the West Virginia-Kentucky border, offers a sometimes shocking, often outrageous, always irreverent look at this young man�s attempt to escape his home.

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  When Miners March - The Battle of Blair Mountain (2008)
  Voice-over by MountainWhispers.com Audiobooks / Ross Ballard (Documentary) Narrator, 43 characters voiced An explosive and revealing look at one of the most profound secrets in our nation's history; slavery did not end with the Civil War. In West Virginia's coalfields change came slowly. (Free 16 song music soundtrack included.)

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  Lost Highway (2006)
  Voice-over by MountainWhispers.com Audiobooks / Ross Ballard (Drama) 56 Characters voiced As Sapper Reeves drives home in the night from Nashville to Maxwell, West Virginia, after recording his latest album, he recalls his abortive early career, some of the demoralized times when he wasn't playing and lived separately from his wife, Riva, and son, Bobby, and the gnawing pain inflicted by Bobby's maiming in the Vietnam War, which occurred just as Sapper was getting a second chance in music. Currey parcels out Sapper's memories in little chapters that quietly, vividly conjure weather, terrain, and buildings as well as the people Sapper and the other two Still Creek Boys (Sapper's original "combo") encounter on their desperately modest performance tours through the 1950s upper South. Despite these descriptive beauties and the appeal of Sapper's self-possessed persona, the book is hampered by a vocabulary more literary than seems credible in a narrator who never mentions reading anything, by clots of vague prose poetry, and by a disconcerting reticence about music. But how many other country-music novels are there?

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  The Great Baltimore Fire! (2004)
  Voice-over by MountainWhispers.com Audiobooks / Ross Ballard (Documentary) Narrator - 34 characters voiced 1904 was expected to be a year of new inventions, imaginative innovations and great civic pride. After all, there was The World's Fair in St. Louis to attend, Teddy Roosevelt had defeated Alton B. Parker for the US Presidency, the "Caterpillar Track" made its debut revolutionizing the construction industry as well as the art of land warfare, and a true American favorite was born - the ice cream cone. While many lofty predictions of greatness did come true, that fateful year would also turn out to be one of unimaginable tragedy, of perilous worry, and of great destruction.

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  Conduct to the Prejudice of Good Order (2003)
  Voice-over by MountainWhispers.com Audiobooks / Ross Ballard (Drama) 48 Characters Voiced "Conduct to the Prejudice of Good Order" tells the story of low troop moral, high stakes drug deals and the prosecution of ill-fated soldiers caught in the chaos that was Southeast Asia in 1971-72. Through the eyes of Captain Bill Blake of the Judge Advocate General�s Corp. we are taken by surprise as the truth of America�s first television war emerges. What the public saw from the comfort of their living rooms was a cleansed version of how a war is supposed to go: overwhelming success on the battlefields with total victory always in site. What America wasn�t seeing on the evening news amid the enemy body counts was our own high incidence of racism, severe addiction to heroin, and a vendetta-driven form of murder known as �fragging�. Through the chaotic tangle of rank and disorder comes the truth about war and those who profess to manage it: war isn�t just Hell, it is also Goodbye.

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  Daughter of the Elm (2002)
  Voice-over by MountainWhispers.com Audiobooks / Ross Ballard (Drama) 43 Characters Voiced In Victorian 1899, Granville Davisson Hall, wrote his seventh book that would be his one and only novel. A moving "Daughter of the Elm", set in the rough and tumble days of Civil War Clarksburg, Virginia touched off quite a controversy at home while climbing the "must read" list of many scholars and socialites from New York City to San Francisco. The true story of the beautiful Lorraine Esmond, her determined fight to stay above the immorality of a criminal family, and her forbidden love for the man she barely knew, is as real today as it was over 100 years ago. Now WV Writer/Producer Ross Ballard II has uncovered this long lost murder mystery. Joining Ballard in bringing this and other WV stories to life are the talented folks at River Recording Studios in Falling Waters, WV. Studio owner and engineer Donnie Purnell has gone all out to find the best digital recording artists and musicians in the region for this production. On the artistic side, Ballard and his team weave thrilling old time radio drama, emotional violin music from one of Appalachia�s best fiddle players, Leonard Carpenter and explosive sound effects to guide the listener along a murderously twisted path. "A suspenseful crime story I would loved to have prosecuted way back then," says Scott Reynolds assistant prosecuting attorney for Harrison County. With impeccable Victorian English, "Daughter of the Elm" lives again with the vitality and suspense Hall originally intended.

• Audie Award Nominee for Best Audio Drama - NYC "Screaming with the Cannibals"
  (2014)

• Antioch University New England
  (1986-1988)

• Eastern Kentucky University
  (1986-1988)