You may have noticed a glut of two-demensional media about Appalachia lately. From the bestselling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" to news stories that bill the region as "Trump country," a lot of ink is being spilt over persistent poverty in our mountains. Unfortunately, little sinks deep.
That's why "Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia" is remarkable. It doesn't settle for half-baked explanations—the dying coal industry is making people poor or, even worse, their own laziness. Instead, as guest blogger Chelyen Davis explains, this new book digs at Appalachian poverty's historic roots.
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Early in Steve Stoll’s “Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia,” he tells of an anthropologist who studied the Siriono people of eastern Bolivia. The anthropologist found their culture simple, lacking in mythology and rituals, using almost no tools, games, or music. He declared them to be primitive, culturally backward. Yet he never asked why the Siriono lacked these things. It turns out they were nearly exterminated by smallpox two decades before, losing the ability to transmit ritual and culture and lacking the manpower to expand their food base. By missing this, Stoll writes, the anthropologist “mistook condition for culture.” And like him, “…we will fail to ask the right questions if we are deceived into thinking that some people have no history, that their poverty is inherent, its causes evident.” Case study writing services help to clarify the details.
Those wearied by the glut of Appalachian poverty articles in the news over the last couple of years—pieces which usually assume the region's poverty is inherent, its causes evident—might see a connection.
Many of these stories use tired stereotypes of the region (primarily its coalfields) as downtrodden and its people as despairing. To the extent that any of these pieces look deeper, they explain that Appalachia is desperate because coal is a dying industry.
But that’s as far as they go. They write about our reliance on coal without asking how the region’s economy got so extraction-centered in the first place, and they write about poverty without questioning its deeper causes. Mistaking condition for culture, as Stoll says, they miss key questions.
Why would the demise of the coal industry undermine the economy of states like West Virginia and the job outlook of the miner? Because, according to Stoll, corporations seeking profit from timber and coal destroyed or enclosed land that had been used as a commons—where citizens could hunt, gather, fish, and pasture livestock—and they did so with the collusion of the state. Ever since, both state and people have paid the price.
The author argues is that dispossessing people from Appalachian land (chiefly whites, though he also touches on African-Americans and Native Americans) caused poverty.
To place this in historic context, Stoll—a Fordham University history professor—connects Appalachia’s land grab to enclosures in England that began in the 16th century. In both cases, the elimination of common land forced people into wage-based work, which, in turn, made them poorer.
Dispossessing people of land, Stoll says, also involves creating a false narrative—that those people were backward, degenerate, and unable to put land to its most profitable use. He traces that narrative and, the effort to make Appalachian land and people part of a capitalist economy, back to post-Revolutionary War times, as leaders like Alexander Hamilton sought to bring the frontier into compliance with the government. Dispossession is a government policy with social consequences—a choice, not an inevitability—says the author.
“Any Scots-Irish, Cherokee, or African-American with a cabin and garden knew that dispossession served someone else’s purpose,” Stoll writes, “It was an instrument of control, not a sign of progress.”
Stoll does propose a solution—a multi-point plan in which commons are restored. Much of West Virginia’s land is owned by corporations. He proposes that some of it be used to build “commons communities,” with affordable housing; an ecological base for hunting, gathering and gardening; social services and education paid for in part by an Industrial Abandonment Tax; and a reprieve from federal income tax for residents with low incomes. As idealistic as this seems, he also acknowledges that this vision has its problems, and isn’t likely to happen when capitalism continues to define progress. Still, it’s nice to see a proposed solution for poverty that doesn’t urge Appalachians to hit the hillbilly highway to big cities, instead encouraging them to stay in the mountains and thrive in a way that doesn’t rely on extraction industries.
I would be remiss in not noting an error: Stoll says he personally observed Bluefield, my hometown, as having sparse grocery shelves and no locally-owned restaurants. Bluefield is one of those places that's bisected by a state line with a city and a town on either side, but it functions as a single place for commerce and shopping. While both Bluefields have lost population and businesses due to coal's slow decline, there are indeed locally-owned restaurants (and have been my whole life) and more than one well-stocked grocery store.
But otherwise, the author documents sources and facts extensively, with 51 pages of endnotes and 44 of bibliography. With a long and winding narrative, this academic book may tax some readers. But it also puts Appalachia's history in a global context, drawing connections from West Virginia to the world as it evaluates notions of “progress” and what that means for agrarian societies...as Appalachia once was.
It also struck a personal chord. Reading it, I thought of my grandfather, who grew up on a Southwest Virginia tenant farm, land his family worked but didn’t own. Eventually the farm became part of Jefferson National Forest—another kind of land-taking, albeit one that prevents some forms of exploitation. Stoll writes of broad changes, which can range from the creation of large parks to the invention of mineral rights. For many of us, those shifts reflect very directly in our personal family histories. In that way, this book doesn’t put just Appalachia in context. For me, it also puts my forebears in context, and for anyone trying to understand the vast, complex Appalachian region, “Ramp Hollow” is a valuable read.
Combing everything from an old blues tune to Appalachian folklore, today's guest blogger—Luke Bauserman—finds inspiration in ghostly dogs. Here, he explains the common thread between old stories about canines and shares one that has spooked mountain people for more than a century.
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In 1937, Robert Johnson recorded one of the most haunting blues songs of all time, “Hellhound on My Trail.” While experts debate the exact meaning of Johnson’s lyrics, the imagery is chilling. The first time I heard the song, I immediately imagined a beast like the Hound of the Baskervilles chasing a blues singer through the backwoods of Mississippi.
The association between dogs and the underworld is very widespread in ancient folklore and has continued into modern times. In ancient Egypt and Rome, fearsome dogs guarded the gates to the underworld. The British Isles have a rich tradition of “black dog” lore. Such critters are associated with death, bad omens, the Devil, and crossroads.
It’s then no surprise that when Europeans settled in the mountains of Appalachia, they brought their folk tales with them. In "Virginia Folk Legends," Thomas E. Barden writes that during the New Deal, researchers employed by the Virginia Writers’ Project gathered twenty-one narratives of supernatural and/or “devil” dogs in their collecting, most of them from Appalachia and all of them from mountainous regions of the state. One striking aspect of the stories is how similar their descriptions of ghostly dogs are. “The dogs are always large and black, and they have remarkable eyes, which are variously described as being red, ‘as big a saucers,’ and ‘shining like balls of fire.’”
In writing my novel "Some Dark Holler," I spent a lot of time hunting down and reading these “devil dog” stories. My favorite one was “The Black Dog of the Blue Ridge,” recorded by Mrs. R.F. Herrick in 1907. In it, we meet a supernatural black dog who is both a terrifying creature and a character worthy of sympathy. This story inspired me to take a similar approach with Sampson, the hellhound in "Some Dark Holler."
In Botetourt County, Virginia, there is a pass that was much traveled by people going to Bedford County and by visitors to mineral springs in the vicinity. In the year 1683, the report was spread that at the wildest part of the trail in this pass there appeared at sunset a great black dog, who, with majestic tread, walked in a listening attitude about two hundred feet and then turned and walked back. Thus he passed back and forth like a sentinel on guard, always appearing at sunset to keep his nightly vigil and disappearing again at dawn. And so the whispering went with bated breath from one to another, until it had traveled from one end of the state to the other.
Parties of young cavaliers were made up to watch for the black dog. Many saw him. Some believed him to be a veritable dog sent by some master to watch; others believed him to be a witch dog. A party decided to go through the pass at night, well armed, to see if the dog would molest them. Choosing a night when the moon was full they mounted good horses and sallied forth. Each saw a great dog larger than any dog they had ever seen, and, clapping spurs to their horses, they rode forward. But they had not calculated on the fear of their steeds. When they approached the dog, the horses snorted with fear, and in spite of whip, spur, and rein gave him a wide berth, while he marched on as serenely as if no one were near. The party was unable to force their horses to take the pass again until after daylight. Then they were laughed at by their comrades to whom they told their experiences. Thereupon they decided to lie in ambush, kill the dog, and bring in his hide.
The next night found the young men well hidden behind rocks and bushes with guns in hand. As the last ray of sunlight kissed the highest peak of the Blue Ridge, the black dog appeared at the lower end of his walk and came majestically toward them. When he came opposite, every gun cracked. When the smoke cleared away, the great dog was turning at the end of his walk, seemingly unconscious of the presence of the hunters. Again and again they fired, and still, the dog walked his beat, and fear caught the hearts of the hunters, and they fled wildly away to their companions, and the black dog held the pass at night unmolested.
Time passed, and year after year went by, until seven years had come and gone, when a beautiful woman came over from the old country, trying to find her husband who eight years before had come to make a home for her in the new land. She traced him to Bedford County, and from there all trace of him was lost. Many remembered the tall, handsome man and his dog. Then there came to her ear the tale of the vigil of the great dog of the mountain pass, and she pleaded with the people to take her to see him, saying that if he was her husband’s dog, he would know her.
A party was made up, and before night they arrived at the gap. The lady dismounted and walked to the place where the nightly watch was kept. As the shadows grew long, the party fell back on the trail, leaving the lady alone, and as the sun sank into his purple bed of splendor the great dog appeared. Walking to the lady, he laid his great head in her lap for a moment, then turning he walked a short way from the trail, looking back to see that she was following. He led her until he paused by a large rock, where he gently scratched the ground, gave a long, low wail, and disappeared. The lady called the party to her and asked them to dig. As they had no implements, and she refused to leave, one of them rode back for help. When they dug below the surface, they found the skeleton of a man and the hair and bones of a great dog. They found a seal ring on the hand of the man and a heraldic embroidery in silk that the wife recognized. She removed the bones for proper burial and returned to her old home. It was never known who had killed the man. But from that time to this the great dog, having finished his faithful work has never appeared again.
Source: Herrick, Mrs. R. F. “The Black Dog of the Blue Ridge.” Journal of American Folklore 20 (1907): 151-52.
In Roanoke, the Muse brothers were legends. For about half their lives, they were traded between circuses. Their genetic disorder—albinism—left their skin unusually pale and their eyes pink-tinged plus they wore their hair in dreadlocks. Today, they may not sound too exotic, but during the first decades of the 20th century, their appearances made them one of the era's most popular and enduring sideshow acts. Billed as everything from cannibals to martians, the brothers toured the U.S. and Europe, sometimes getting paid, sometimes being swindled by their managers, white men who, for years, told them that their African-American mother was dead.
A young journalist named Beth Macy moved to Roanoke in 1989. By then, the Muse brothers had long since returned to the area. George, the older and more outgoing of the two, had actually passed away some years before. Willie, who was approaching 100-years-old, rarely left the attic of his house in Roanoke's Rugby neighborhood, just a few dozen miles from Truevine, the hamlet where he was born.
Theirs was the best story in town, Beth was told, but also the least accessible. "No one's been able to get it," one photographer said, and she soon learned why.
Nancy Saunders, great-niece to the Muse brothers, ran her soul food restaurant like a drill sergeant. "The first time I asked if I could interview Willie Muse," Beth wrote in her bestselling book "Truevine," "...she pointed to a homemade sign on the Goody Shop wall. A customer had stenciled the words in black block letters...SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP."
Most anyone else would have given up there and then, but Beth is the rarest kind of journalist. Rather than bouncing from a small paper to a mid-sized one, trying to work her way to one of the big boys, she stayed at The Roanoke Times for more than twenty years and told stories of local underdogs—a gay man whose name had been removed from his partner's obituary, a wife struggling to care for her husband as dementia stole his mind. Between researching and writing what must have been hundreds of pieces, Beth kept visiting the Goody Shop.
In time, she learned why Nancy was so protective. From the day George and Willie returned to the area, they were treated like oddities. Strangers, both black and white, came to their house, insisting that relatives bring them outside so they could have a look. Children in the family were subjected to taunts. "Your uncles eat raw meat!" classmates would shout, having learned about the brothers as a cautionary tale. Don't end up like those Muse boys, black parents told their children, a stranger nabbed them from a tobacco field when they were little and turned them into circus slaves.
Sometimes it was easy to sort fact from fiction. The brothers, of course, did not eat raw meat. But their origin story, how they ended up in the circus, was more nuanced. Beth found it hard to believe that their mother, an illiterate but savvy sharecropper who was both alive during their circus years and ready to fight for her sons, could have been so easily duped.
Nancy disagreed. Even as she warmed to the idea of sharing her uncles' story, she held to the version she'd always heard, one Willie himself had told her, "a man luring him and his brother into the back of his wagon with a piece of candy."
As much as anything, "Truevine" is about this unlikely partnership—two women sorting through a provocative and often brutal history. Beth combed archives. Nancy talked to relatives. They both uncovered clues about the brothers' difficult lives, many in the form of photos.
"George's chin is raised, almost defiantly, while Willie looks straight into the camera," Beth wrote about one image. "His right hand is held in the playing style known as clawhammer, thumb out from the body of the banjo and fingers tucked."
Clawhammer is, of course, a technique popular with mountain musicians, but it's unlikely Willie learned it in Truevine. When he left, he was only six-years-old. He probably picked it up from minstrels, who also favored this style and, perhaps unwittingly, provided the younger Muse with a connection to his homeland.
Beth called this photo her "favorite from the stack," and that stack was large. Time and again, she described images of the brothers and people they knew—literal giants and pygmies, sword swallowers, and pinheads, outsiders who embraced the word "freak" because it carved a place for them in society, who worked the sideshows because it was the only living they could make.
Without these shots, it would have been tough to reconstruct the Muse brothers' story and harder still to glean who they were as boys and later men, how they changed over time. A downward glance or a tattered sleeve sometimes conveyed more than all their old circus posters combined.
Time caught up with Willie. He passed some fifteen years before Beth wrote "Truevine." As the book neared completion, she and a photographer visited Nancy's house, where they took new pictures, including shots of Willie's attic room. Before they left, Nancy slipped Beth a quote she'd found in the newspaper, one by the philosopher Voltaire.
When you look at the below photos, what kind of truth do you see? What stands out as you peer back through time and study the faces of George, Willie, and their mother Harriett Muse?
"The Muse brothers were widely considered 'good examples of contented freaks,'" wrote The New Yorker magazine, which snidely reported that the brothers returned to the circus [after a stint back home] because 'the fried chicken had soon given out at Roanoke.' (Collection of Robert Stauffer)
All photos used with permission from Little, Brown and Company.
Appalachian Appetite: A Food Photo Contest has become a perennial favorite for the region's shutterbugs. They've submitted mouthwatering images and helped change how we think about modern mountain food. (Appalachian goulash, anyone?)
Covered by media outlets that run the length of the Appalachian South—from Asheville Citizen-Times to West Virginia Public Radio—the contest is The Revivalist's biggest recurring promotion and one reason some 200,000 readers visit the site annually.
As Appalachian Appetite moves into its third year, it enjoys strong support from current prize sponsors, The Mast Farm Inn and Smoky Mountain Living magazine, and is poised to grow. More categories of winners, more prizes, and the addition of judges—these all promise to take the contest to a new level.
They've also led to an exciting leadership opportunity. If you want to give back to Appalachia and have proven coordination skills, check out the below listing. With a flexible schedule and substantial responsibility, this unique volunteer position is the perfect way to build your professional network while demonstrating that you're a self-starter who gets things done.
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Environmental activist and grandmother Lorelei Scarbro understands how important coal is. Her son-in-law is a miner. Though she despises the flagrant abuses of the coal industry, she knows that thousands of families rely on mining jobs. Maybe that's why she was able to build a friendship with Betty Harrah, a fiery pro-coal advocate whose brother died in the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine explosion.
Following this unusual duo over the course of seven years, a new documentary called "Overburden" explores the strain of coal extraction on Appalachian people. In the below preview, you see the human side of this terribly divisive issue.
The documentary airs January 22, 2017 as part of the television series REEL SOUTH on the WORLD Channel. It will also be available on the REEL SOUTH website starting January 23.
Do you know outspoken coal women on either side of this debate? If so, please leave a comment and tell us all about them.
Reel South Exclusive Clip: Overburden from Southern Documentary Fund on Vimeo.
Coal isn't Appalachia's only extraction problem. Copper mining decimated Tennessee's Copper Basin more than a hundred years ago. Trees were burnt for smelting, and sulfur released from the ore poured back down on the area in the form of acid rain. Practically every plant was destroyed for fifty square miles.
As an attempt at recovery, sulfur-tolerant pines were planted during the 1940s. Some seventy years later, the basin remains half bare, its red soil making it look more like a Martian landscape than Appalachia as we know it.
Poet Casey LeFrance, who was raised in the area, says that, in spite of the damage, wealthy vacationers and retirees are now pouring into the surrounding countryside. They deliver some economic improvements but also bring new threats. In the below poem, he writes about all the changes in his corner of Tennessee.
The bestseller "Hillbilly Elegy" left out a lot of hillbillies. Big thanks to the Chicago Tribune for giving me a chance to sing their praises with the below essay.
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I have a lot in common with J.D. Vance, author of the new memoir "Hillbilly Elegy." We both grew up dirt poor in hillbilly households. We both ended up at Ivy League schools — Yale for him, Harvard for me — and somehow we both made our way into America's urban, professional class. While he and I are cut from the same cloth, we look at our kinfolk, blue-collar people in the Appalachian South, and see wildly different things.
In his best-selling book, Vance shines an unforgiving light on hillbilly culture, using his own family as examples. I'll never forget the description of his uncle taking an electric saw to a man, nearly killing him because the fella called him a son of a b----, or the scene in which his grandparents trash a pharmacy after a clerk chastised their boy. To Vance, as a child, this was normal behavior. To the rest of us, these people seem unhinged.
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Before Earnest Hemingway, John Updike, or Breece Pancake, I read books written by Earl Hamner, Jr. His most notable titles, Spencer's Mountain and The Homecoming, centered around one Appalachian family. Named the Spencers in print, they were later called the Waltons on TV.
Like me, this fictional brood lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains, though they did so during The Great Depression, some fifty years before I was raised there. They were poor but never destitute, earnest but never banal. They resembled my family in many ways, but somehow their lives were less sordid. None did jail time. They never said filthy things or whipped their children with belts. They were the kind of people we aspired to be, ones who became noble by way of their strife.
When Hamner brought this goodhearted family into the mainstream, he pulled off a coup. During the tumult of the 1960s and 70s, in the midst of race and gender struggles and a time of burgeoning sexuality, he wrote simple stories—one about a son searching for his father during a snow storm, many about the same boy torn between his loyalty to home and his drive to be a writer. Even when Hamner's tales addressed hot button issues, like racism or antisemitism, he ran against the grain, revealing that goodness didn't come from picket signs but instead the human heart.
At age eleven, I was too young to glean any of that. I just knew that I loved the Spencers and the Waltons. Whichever surname, they meant the world to my mother, brother, and me. We actually imitated them at night, saying goodnight, John-Boy, and goodnight, Mary Ellen before bed, and my little brother adopted Elizabeth Walton as his imaginary friend. The youngest of the televised siblings, she played with him when he was alone and was the first to be blamed when he did something wrong. In time, she became a running joke. The line Elizabeth did it sent peals of laughter through our tiny, third-floor apartment.
This morning, thirty-some years later, my husband texted me, saying, "Earl Hamner died. 92 years old." I was working on the final chapters of my first novel at the time and stopped, stunned.
I'd always fantasized about meeting him once the book was done. During a telephone interview or lunch near his LA home, I would explain the peculiar role his characters played in my life, saying that he was the first author who made me want to write.
It's true. Though I loved other books, none led me to think I might pen one. It took a mountain man to spark that notion, and while I'll never be able to thank Mr. Hamner for that, I can still suggest you find his work. His novels about the Spencers are out of print but worth the search. In them, you'll see how unabashed goodness can be enthralling and how Appalachia, for all its grit, can sooth the soul.
*Special thanks to Rod Leith, who shared this clip.
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Pedigree Dogs
By Casey LaFrance
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