1. Barbara Kopple, Harlan County, U.S.A. (Cabin Creek Films, 1976). My work here also draws on my research in the outtake footage, wild tracks, and supporting materials in the Harlan County U.S.A. Collection in the Special Collections Research Center, University of Kentucky Library, Lexington, Kentucky. I thank Barbara Kopple for permission to use this restricted archive.
2. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, translated and edited by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Rick Altman, ed., Sound Theory/Sound Practice (New York: Routlege, 1992) and Altman, ed., “Cinema/Sound Special Issue,” Yale French Studies (1980): 60l; Elisabeth Weis & Belton John, eds., Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” Film Quarterly 36:3 (Spring 1983): 17–30; and “To See the World Anew: Revisiting the Voice of Documentary,” in Speaking Truths With Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 74–89.
3. On documentary work during the 1930s and 1940s, see William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Harper and Row, 1973); and Jonathan Kahana, Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). My thinking about documentary culture in the post-1945 US has been shaped by extended conversations with Franny Nudelman, Associate Professor of English, Carlton University.
4. Author’s interviews with Lee Sparks, MFD and UMW organizer, working in Harlan County during the strike, 2010; Fred Harris, “Burning People Up to Make Electricity,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1974), 29–36.
5. I name, define, and trace the history of this category “participatory documentary” in my larger book in progress The History We Make: Participatory Documentary in the US South from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.
6. Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: Southern Mountains and Mountineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); David Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); W. K. McNeil, Appalachian Images in Folk and Popular Culture (1989, rpt., Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995); Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990); Jane S. Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Elizabeth Engelhardt, The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2003).
7. Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine; Filene, Romancing the Folk.
8. Allen H. Eaton, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1937). On FSA photography, see F. Jack Hurley, A Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (New York: Da Capo, 1977); James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991; Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); Cara Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photography (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003); and Sara Blair and Eric Rosenberg, Trauma and Documentary Photography of the the FSA (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Many of these WPA and TVA photographs are available online on the Library of Congress’s American Memory website at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html and on Photogrammar, a website that offers search and visualization tools for using the FSA and OWI photography collections, at http://photogrammar.yale.edu/.
9. The Library of Congress’s Motion Picture and Television Reading Room owns good prints of many of these films, including Appalachia: Rich Land, Poor People. Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary),” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 152–206.
10. John Cohen, multiple interviews with the author, 2010 and 2012; John Cohen, The High Lonesome Sound (1963); and Tom Davenport and Barry Dornfeld, Remembering the High Lonesome Sound (2003), film available at http://www.folkstreams.net/film,42. On the folk music revival, see Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); and my book A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 84–131.
11. My argument here draws on an archive I have assembled of over 250 southern “folk” films. The best place to start watching these and other interesting films of this type is Tom Davenport’s site Folkstreams at http://www.folkstreams.net/.
12. My arguments here draw upon the Appalshop film archive and my own research on Appalshop, including 2016 interviews with long-time Appalshop director Elizabeth Barrett and Appalshop archivist Caroline Rubens as well as the research of former UVA undergraduate Lauren Tilton, now a visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at University of Richmond, who wrote an American Studies Honors Thesis on Appalshop and expanded this work in her 2016 Yale American Studies dissertation, “In Local Hands: Participatory Media in the 1960s.”
13. Harlan County U.S.A. Collection; Miners for Democracy Papers.
14. Here and throughout, I draw on my research in the Miners for Democracy papers at the Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. The strike started on June 30, 1973.
15. Workman in fact lived in Mingo County, West Virginia, not Harlan County, Kentucky.
16. Scott Matthews, “John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky: Documentary Expression and the Image of Roscoe Halcomb During the Folk Revival,” Southern Spaces (August 6, 2008), https://southernspaces.org/2008/john-cohen-eastern-kentucky-documentary-expression-and-image-roscoe-halcomb-during-folk-revival, accessed December 15, 2016.
17. The danger here is that the music will make labor militancy seem as old-fashioned as the songs.
18. There is a great deal to say about Worthington, how race works in this film, and the racial politics of Appalachian poverty in the 1960s and 1970s, but it is the topic of another paper.