Memoir
Pearl, I’m sorry. I’m not feeling it anymore. I tried. For years, I tried. You know I did. I served on the board of your Birthplace in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. I read the biographies. I wrote grants and hired volunteers and emailed leaders across the state and researched themed tours for your museum. I »
Music
“I’d like to say it’s nobody’s fault, but it is. It’s James Dickey’s fault. Or John Boorman’s. Or both.” I’m what you might call a “closeted” banjo player, so this may well be my coming-out paper. My parents were hippie folkies, and I grew up in the Appalachian region marinating in so much old-time string »
Music
“Dolly, where I come from would I have called you a hillbilly?” asked Barbara Walters in 1977. “If you had, it would have probably been very natural, but I’d have probably kicked your shins,” replied Dolly Parton, continuing, “We’re the ones you would consider the Li’l Abner people, Daisy Mae, and that sort of thing—they »
Photo Essay
The New Vrindaban is a Krishna community in the hills of Appalachia, the vision of A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder and spiritual leader of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. The New Vrindaban in West Virginia is the realization of Prabhupada’s dream to establish a holy pilgrimage site in North America. It was »
Film
The most shocking moment in Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) looks at first like an abstract painting. An organic shape, small and shiny and pinkish white, sits on a dark, rough ground. Even after an enormous disembodied finger pokes into the frame, the visual alone remains indecipherable. Previous scenes have shown striking miner Lawrence Jones lying »
Essay
“Regularly, Appalachia is imagined to need a funeral, to be already gone, to cry out for remembrance.” When the editors of Southern Cultures asked me to guest edit a special issue on Appalachia, I said yes immediately. Not only is western North Carolina my family home, but Appalachian Studies is my most long-standing scholarly home. »
Essay
“Appalachia is still itself, even as it changes, even as so many of us have gotten it wrong.” As far back as colonial days, all the experts agreed that the Mountain South was different, even when they couldn’t explain how or why. Observers often blamed degenerate settlers. Royal governor Alexander Spotswood claimed that Virginia’s mountaineers »
Interview
Essay
In 1909, Mare Samuella Cromer, a young rural schoolteacher in the western South Carolina town of Aiken, heard a speech about Seaman A. Knapp’s boys’ corn clubs that were transforming southern crop yields. Knapp, a scholar originally from the Midwest but working in Texas and the larger South, created the blueprint for the turn-of-the-century U.S. »
Photo Essay
After her mother Jeroline Rice passed in 2003, Marian Waters sorted through boxes of photographs that her father Isaiah Rice had taken over the course of his adult life. Rice, who died in 1980, had taken hundreds of photographs of family, friends, and strangers in his Asheville, North Carolina community. While Waters always knew her »
Poetry
Interview
I met Margaret Walker Alexander in the fall of 1970 when I taught my first class at Jackson State University. She and I both taught in the English Department, and I will never forget a lecture that Margaret gave to my students on Zora Neale Hurston. She and Zora had traveled similar roads as southern »