Appalachian History

“The Tomahawk Store was a very important center for the village. E. Trone and Maude Hedges lived there and ran the store when I was a child. It was a true general store as they sold many of the food items that couldn’t be home grown, along with sewing notions, nails, candy, soda pop and ice cream, bits of hardware, chicken feed, etc. Floor to ceiling shelves full of goods were on two walls while large glass display cases held other items of interest. One of the largest cases held box after box of penny candy that we loved to buy when we had a penny or two.

“There were two large gas pumps outside as well as a compressor to fill the car tires with air. In the early days most of the families did not have refrigerators so the store also sold ice. If a woman in the village needed something that couldn’t be found in the store, Maude would go into her quarters and look to see if she had an extra. I still have a wooden ironing board that she gave my mother one day when she found out that Mother didn’t have one. Nobody had much money in those days and Trone often let people buy things on credit until payday came around. For many years the store had the only telephone in the village and they were generous enough to let people use it to call the doctor or the undertaker.


“In front of the display cases were long wooden benches that were filled every evening with men who liked to sit around the potbelly stove and “loaf.” (This was interpreted to mean smoke, chew tobacco and gossip.) Naturally, the men thought the matters they “cussed” and discussed were very important and that only women gossiped. My granddad spent most of his day sitting on the store porch. His opinions were sought out at election time but since he was a staunch Republican and most of the others Democrats, we suspected that they voted the opposite of what he told them. Trone and Maude had a pet parrot that lived at the store. The parrot didn’t last long after the young men taught it to cuss."


---from “Growing up in Tomahawk” by Judith Rooney Erskine
The Berkeley Journal, issue 28, 2002, publ by the Berkeley County Historical Society


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“When I went with other children to see him work in his blacksmith shop I would stand just inside the door and watch him. The shop, made of logs, had no window. Smoke from the forge passed through a short chimney made of mud and field rocks and then wandered toward the eve of the blackened roof. The shop was always smoky.

“Uncle Wash would pull a pole attached to a big bellows shaped like a guitar body and the bellows would blow a stream of fresh air against the coals. They would become almost white with heat. You could see a horseshoe or a mattock change from black to a dull red and on to white hot as he pumped the bellows. Then he would take the object out with a pair of long tongs, hold it on the anvil, and beat it fast with a shop hammer, like he was making music.

“The white hot sparks would fly in all directions, but they would lose their glow by the time they struck anything. When Uncle Wash had the mattock as sharp as he wanted it, or the horseshoe corked just to suit his notion, he would souse it in a tub of water and hold it there for a few minutes to temper it. White steam would rise from the sizzling object and blow around Uncle Wash. He looked like what I thought the devil might have looked like with the coals glowing in the forge behind him and the steam streaming around him, except he didn’t have a fishhook tail like the devil.

“He would shoe horses in front of his shop, which had a roof that stuck several feet out toward the road. It was fun to watch him pare the horse’s hoof down with a knife that had a crooked blade before he fitted the shoe. Then he drove nails through holes in the shoe and into the edge of the hoof until they came out an inch or two above the shoe. After all the nails were in, he would bend them down with pliers and strike them a time or two with a special hammer that had a ball on it instead of claws. He rasped the hoof with a big file to make it flush with the sides of the horseshoe. He seemed strong for such a little man as he held the horse’s foot up with one hand and worked with the other.”

Tales from Sacred Wind: Coming of Age in Appalachia
by Cratis D. Williams
2003, McFarland & Company

Cratis Williams (1911-1985) was an eloquent defender of Appalachian Culture and one of the most important scholars of the post-war era.

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Easter’s around the corner. If you keep chickens, be sure to color those biddies' eggs; otherwise they won’t hatch! Ever heard that before? Appalachia’s full of such superstitions. Here’re a few:

Weather:
Aching joints indicate rain.
When a bobwhite calls, it’s praying for rain.
Thick, tight shucks on corn indicate bad weather.
Killing a black snake and hanging it on a fence with its belly turned to the sun will bring rain before the next sunset.
If it rains on Monday, it will rain 3 days that week.
An owl hooting high on the mountain signals fair weather; the owl hooting in the lower lands signals foul weather.
There will be as many snows in a winter as there are fogs in October.

Marriage:
If a girl sleeps in a strange bed and names each bedpost a boy’s name, the post she looks to first upon waking will name the boy she’ll marry.
A girl won’t get married if anyone sweeps under her feet.

Dreams:
A dream about the dead means you’ll get a letter.
If you sleep in a strange bed, whatever you dream will come true.

Death:
If a cow moos after dark, someone will die.
If a bird flies against a window pane, there will be a death in the family.
If a dog howls before the moon rises, someone will die.



You’ll have good luck if you:
Find a 4-hole button.
Always put your right sock and shoe on first.
See a bluebird.
Look at the new moon over your left shoulder.
Find a red ear of corn.
Find a pin and pick it up.
Find a penny lying “heads-up” and put it in your right shoe.

Source: Gathering Up Memories: A Collection of Appalachian Stories
By Ann Goode Cooper
Published 2003
Parkway Publishers, Inc.


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They’re the first greens of the season, and they’re coming up right about now. Ramps, (Allium tricoccum or Allium tricoccum var. burdickii, Alliaceae) also known as wild leeks, are native to the Appalachian mountains. Ramps can be found growing in patches in rich, moist, deciduous forests as far north as Canada, west to Missouri and Minnesota, and south to North Carolina and Tennessee.

Back before supermarkets arrived they provided necessary vitamins and minerals following long winter months without access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

The salient feature of ramps is the smell. The Menominee Indians called it "pikwute sikakushia": the skunk. "Shikako," their name for a large ramp patch that once flourished in northern Illinois, has been anglicized to Chicago: "the skunk place."

Ramps are pleasant to eat and taste like spring onions with a strong garlic-like aroma. They are often prepared by frying in butter or animal fat with sliced potatoes or scrambled eggs. They are also used as an ingredient in other dishes such as soup, pancakes, and hamburgers. They can also be pickled or dried for use later in the year.


On the heels of ramps a host of other greens start popping up: dandelions, poke, shawnee lettuce, woolen britches, creasies, and lamb's tongue. And around these, women have fashioned womens' worlds. "That was the big deal, when everybody used to go green picking," says Carrie Lou Jarrell, of Sylvester, WV.

"That was the event of the week. Mrs. Karen Thomas would come up and she always brought Jessie Graybill with her, and then Miss Haddad would come, and most of the time Maggie Wriston came with her. And usually Sylvia Williams was always there to do green picking with them. I knew from the time I came into the world that she was just a good friend. But that was the thrill of my life to get to go with all of these women, because they talked about good stuff."

The women laugh over how Violet Dickens once mistook sassafras tea for bacon grease and poured it over the frying ramps: "We need you to come season the ramps," Mabel kidded her. They compare the aromas of poke and collard greens, and marvel at how window screens get black with flies when you're cooking them. They wonder where the creasies (dry land cress) are growing this year, and Jenny points out that creasies won't grow unless you till the soil.


Sources:
“Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia”; Library of Congress/American Memories http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/tending/essay4b.html
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/ncnu02/v5-449.html


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Moon moon I can see you smilin' low
You made me think of a sweetheart
A little girl that I loved so
After I've wondered the whole night through
Wonderin' if you think of me
While I'm on my lonesome thinkin' of someone
I'm thinkin' only of you

My Carolina sunshine girl
You have turned my heart to stone
My Carolina sunshine Girl
You have left me all alone

I wonder why I sit and cry
When I really should laugh
At your little old photograph
For you're the sweetest angel in this world

And I love love love you
My Carolina sunshine girl


by Bill Monroe

---credited with creating the ensemble, and the sound, that we have all come to know as bluegrass music. The term for bluegrass music derives from his band, assembled during the 1940’s, “Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys”, which was named in honor of his home state of Kentucky, “where the bluegrass grows."


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When Sergeant Alvin C. York returned to America in 1919 as the best-known hero of the World War, he decided to devote his attention to improving education in his native rural Tennessee. But by 1933 the state Department of Education was investigating charges that York was guilty of incompetence, negligence, nepotism, and bringing in outsiders. What happened?

York's tenure in the military overseas made him painfully aware of his own educational shortcomings and convinced him that an adequate education was the key to advancement. He originally wanted to create several small schools strategically placed in the mountains, but found the goal to be unrealistic. He decided instead to put his energy towards creating an institution known as the York Industrial Institute (later changed to the York Agricultural and Industrial Institute).

In 1925 the Tennessee General Assembly appropriated fifty thousand dollars toward the school's construction. York announced in 1927 that any future donations or gifts that would have gone to him would now go to the building of schools. He helped further finance the project by going on lectures. However, debt piled up, and when his health began to fail, his financial picture only worsened. He had raised only about $10,000 in a school fund. York, a Democrat, battled the local Republican Fentress County executives over the school's location. Local officials threatened the school’s eviction from the site, and York appealed directly to the state legislature and national media for support. As a result, the 1925 legislation was amended to give the state Department of Education oversight of York Institute.

The school finally opened in 1929, but even with state backing York's problems continued. County officials refused to support the school. In order to pay teachers' salaries, York twice mortgaged his home and paid the teachers directly from his own pocket. He also bought school buses with his own money because the county refused to provide them.

The 1933 investigation uncovered no corruption, but state officials recognized that York was ill equipped to assess the capabilities of faculty. And so, the Department of Education decided in 1937 that for the survival of the institution, the state would administer the school's operation. York was named president emeritus and presided over ceremonial functions.

More than twenty years after he returned home from France, Sergeant Alvin York signed with Warner Brothers to tell his life's story. He acted as advisor. Gary Cooper played York, for which performance he won an Academy Award. The movie was released in 1941.

With the $169,449.84 he received from Warner Brothers, York was able to pay off most of his debts.

Sources:
http://tinyurl.com/2whl2e
http://tinyurl.com/328twe


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“I was covering that story, a big story then, big story. And the headline: “US to buy more than one million acres of land for forests.”

“And then the story went on to say that their actual goal was a million, two hundred thousands acres which would eventually become forest in southeastern Ohio. I covered this story as a newspaperman, not because I was necessarily in love with woods at that time. Because I wasn’t really conscious of what had happened over the previous 75-150 years, you see, of what the woods were.

“When you drive from here to Ironton, for instance, today – you’re looking constantly at beautiful forests that didn’t exist sixty years ago, seventy years ago – didn’t exist! They were old bare hills. You would see old cornfields on top of the hills and down in the creek bottoms. There would be pasture around the hills – old barbed wire fences – even remnants now and then of old rail fences.

“We never saw deer – I can guarantee there wasn’t a deer in Ohio, not a single deer. There wasn’t a single beaver in Ohio. It had gone through a hundred years of destruction. When you look back, in fact a little more than a hundred years, you look back into the middle 1800s- everybody was farming, everybody was cutting down timber for wood for lumber.

“We were shipping trainloads of lumber out of Ohio, mind you – out of southeastern Ohio to New York and Philadelphia and the East, or as in southeastern Ohio everybody was cutting down timber for charcoal-making for the iron furnaces.

“That lasted for about forty years. And they were burning up about on an average three acres of woods a day for each furnace. There was this whole century, actually more than a century of wiping our hills and river valleys clean of trees.”

Ora E. Anderson
1911-2006
2003 interview
http://tinyurl.com/33e9fc

Journalist, conservationist, naturalist, and artist. He was named Honorary Life Trustee of the Ohio chapter of The Nature Conservancy and in 2006 he was inducted into the Ohio Natural Resources Hall of Fame. He was the recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Governor's Award for Arts in 1999.


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"I don’t know when I got my first radio, but Daddy had one of the first radios there was in Ceres. It was about as big as television is now. They have the soap operas on the TV now. Then they had “Amos and Andy” on the radio. They came on in the afternoon. You set down and listened to “Amos and Andy” just like the soap operas are now."

Mallie Tibbs
b. 1918
Ceres, VA

"We got our first radio before we moved to Bastian. We lived down there in Cussin Hollow, we had one down there in Marco. It was in the CCC camp and he got Mommy a radio, it was run by batteries because we didn’t have electricity. I listened to string music, and the Grand Ole Opry, Jean Autry, Roy Rogers, Amos and Andy. Amos and Andy was the funny show we’d listen to on the radio. And lets see, Little Orphan Annie, that’s just about it."

Edna Sarver
b. 1922
Chatham Hill, VA

"I got my first radio and it was a talk machine that you had to wind up, then it would run down and it wasn't much of nothing. You would wear yourself down winding it up."

Thelma Akers
b. 1927
Rocky Gap, VA

"I guess I was about twelve years old, when we got our first radio. Mother got a little tiny one when we first got electricity. See, we had kerosene lamps, and when I was about twelve and we moved up Wolf Creek, they put lights up there. And that’s when we got our first little radio. We listened to it a lot! We’d take it to bed with us, and listen to the Grand Ole Opry. One of my favorite shows was The Squeaking Door. There was a lot of daytime programs to listen to in the summertime. Electricity changed our lives. We were thrilled about it."

Georgia Havens
b. 1928
Suiter, VA


Source: http://www.bland.k12.va.us/bland/rocky/stories.html

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Before there was NASCAR (National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing), there were ‘moonrunners.’ A guy with a souped up car with a 200-gallon moonshine tank, driving his coupe at breakneck speeds through the twisty mountain roads to deliver the ‘shine. Usually at night, and usually with police or revenuers waiting for him. Evading the roadblocks and outrunning the chase was all part of a day’s work to a moonshine runner.

Some accounts say that all early race drivers were involved in bootlegging. That is how at least most of them afforded the fastest and therefore most expensive machines--with their moonshine profits. They ran moonshine down the twisty mountain roads to people during Prohibition. The runners would modify their cars in order to create a faster, more maneuverable vehicle to evade the police. They’d remove the rear and passenger seats to make more room for moonshine, add heavy duty suspensions to the rear of the car to handle the extra weight and add a steel plate in front of the radiator. Many of these changes have influenced the design of the modern stock car.

One of the main 'strips' in Knoxville, TN had its beginning as a mecca for aspiring bootlegging drivers. When Prohibition was lifted in 1933, the owners of these first "racecars" watched their profitable businesses dry up. Since they had no reason to use them for "runnin' shine" anymore and found themselves with time on their hands and a lot of money, many wanted to race their cars for pride and money.

These races were popular entertainment in the rural South, and they are most closely associated with the Wilkes County region of North Carolina. Writer Vance Packard called Wilkes County the "the bootleg capital of America" -- in 1935, a raid on one house yielded 7,100 gallons of white whiskey, the largest inland seizure of moonshine ever made in the United States.

Wilkes County products were delivered throughout the area by such driving daredevils as Junior Johnson, the famous moonshiner turned champion NASCAR driver. Junior's father Robert Johnson was one of the biggest copper still operators in the area. The older men did the distilling, the younger ones transported the moonshine, and the women "called the cows" if the U.S. alcohol and tobacco tax agents appeared.

The North Wilkesboro Speedway, opened in 1947, was the first NASCAR track.

source: http://tinyurl.com/3yxsuq


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“The prints were found in a sandstone formation known to belong to the Coal Age, about 12 miles southeast of Berea, KY, by Dr. Wilbur G. Burroughs, professor of geology at Berea College, and William Finnell.




“Recently Prof. Burroughs was visited in his laboratory by some Kentucky mountain men, who took him up into their hills and showed him another place where there were many of the footprints. This mountain site, indeed, seems to have been the ‘Old Kentucky Home’ of a whole family of mysterious animals, for Prof. Burroughs reports that the footprints ‘range in size from small ones about 4-1/2 inches long to tracks the size I have written you about,” which were nearly 10 inches in length.

“The footprints are exceedingly curious things. They are the right size to be human- 9 or ten inches in length – and they are almost the right shape. Practically everyone who sees them thinks at first they were made by human feet and it is almost impossible to persuade people that they were not. If the big toes were only a little bigger, and if the little toes didn’t stick out nearly at a right angle to the axis of the foot, the tracks could easily pass for those of a man. But the boldest estimate of human presence on earth is only a million years – and these tracks are 250 times that old!

“The highest known forms of life in the Coal Age were amphibians. Animals related to frogs and salamanders. If this was an amphibian it must have been a giant of its kind. A further puzzling fact is the absence of any tracks of front feet. The tracks, apparently all of the hind feet of biped animals, are turned in all kinds of random directions. At Bearea, two of them are side by side, as though one of the creatures had stood still for a moment.

“So the riddle stands. A quarter of a billion years ago, this Whats-it That Walked Like a Man left footprints on widely scattered sands that time hardened into rock. Then he vanished. And now scientists are scratching their heads.”

Science News Letter
Oct 29, 1938

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Minnie Pearl didn’t start out as Minnie Pearl: she was born Sarah Ophelia Colley. The character we know today emerged when twenty-seven year old Colley was in the midst of producing an amateur musical comedy in Baileyton, AL in 1939. There she met a young mountain woman on whom she then based her onstage persona, "Cousin Minnie Pearl." Colley first performed as Minnie Pearl that same year in Aiken, SC.

In 1940 Colley appeared at a banking convention in Centerville, TN which some executives of the Grand Ole Opry's host station, WSM, happened to be attending. One suggested that she audition for the Opry, and despite the misgivings of Opry managers that she might be seen as ridiculing country people, she was accepted for a late-evening slot. Several hundred cards and letters addressed to Minnie Pearl arrived at the station over the following weeks, and her place in the cast was assured.

Pearl, who remained with the Opry until her death in 1996, was one of the most widely recognized comic performers American culture has ever produced. With her straw hat and its dangling $1.98 price tag, and her great-hearted holler as she took to the Opry stage, Pearl became an icon of rural America even as she lovingly satirized its ways. Her character was always presented as a man-hungry spinster in the small town of Grinder's Switch, TN, willing to settle for almost anything in the way of male companionship. In real life, she was happily married for many years to Henry Cannon.


Pearl's monologues almost always involved her comical relatives, notably "Uncle Nabob" and "Brother", who was simultaneously both slow-witted and wise. Her frequent exit line to applause was "I love you so much it hurts!" She also sang comic novelty songs, some of which were released as singles, such as "How To Catch A Man."

Now, when a handsome feller smiles at you,
what harm can a little flirtin’ do?

And if he steals a kiss, now don’t get sore.
Remember, you’ve got plenty more!

How to catch a man,
How to catch a man,
Girls are always askin’ me, “How do you catch a man?”
Catch him while you can
With the Minnie Pearl plan.
Here’s a little tip on how to catch a man.

Hog-tie him!

Tell him this and keep a straight face, hon,
Tell him two can live as cheap as one!

Promise him anything, and you will find
that after you are married, you can change your mind!

How to catch a man,
How to catch a man,
Girls are always askin’ me, “How do you catch a man?”
Catch him while you can
With the Minnie Pearl plan.
Here’s a little tip on how to catch a man.

Get a Bear trap!

copyright 1998 King Records,
Lyrics Cy Coben/Delmore Music

Source: James Manheim, All Music Guide
www.cmt.com/artists/az/pearl_minnie/bio.jhtml


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Lewis ‘Hack’ Wilson had already led the National League in homers four out of the previous five years at the beginning of the 1930 season, the year he made baseball history. It was his most glorious season, and the plunge from there was just as astonishing as the rise had been.

Wilson started his career as a catcher in 1921, having caught the eye of minor league president Lewis Thompson from Martinsburg, West Virginia. The 21 year old had been living on his own since age 17 in Chester, Pennsylvania, toiling away at various jobs in a print shop, a locomotive factory, a shipyard, and a silk factory and playing ball for recreation. Thompson had spotted him at one of the local amateur team games and signed the powerful right-handed slugger to his team in the Blue Ridge League.

His Blue Ridge debut made an unusual impact. Sliding into home, he broke his leg and was out of commission until July 11, 1921. While hospitalized, he met Virginia Riddleburger, 31, his future wife whom he married in 1923. They gave birth to their only child, Robert, in 1925. The stress from the fracture made it difficult to perform his catching duties and he returned to action in the outfield by 1922.

Martinsburg fans adopted the happy-go-lucky Wilson and affectionately called him "Stouts." He continued to outperform the minor league circuit when sold to Portsmouth of the Virginia League the following year and had his contract purchased by John McGraw of the New York Giants at the season's end.

Playing centerfield as a regular in 1924, the right-handed throwing Wilson earned the nickname of a former Cub outfielder, Lawrence "Hack" Miller, who was named after a famous Russian wrestler of the era, George Hackenschmidt.

He performed well at first, but later was weakened by an ankle injury. His lifestyle of booze and womanizing irritated McGraw, which gave him an excuse for a demotion to Toledo in late July of 1925. Wilson rebounded there but was left unprotected at the end of the season and the Cubs drafted him for a mere $5000.

Hack Wilson found his niche in Chicago. Under the keen handling of Joe McCarthy, Wilson never hit less than .313 and batted in over 100 runs in each season. His 56 home runs in 1930, a National League record, stood for 68 years.

Baseball glory couldn’t save Hack Wilson’s private life. His uncontrollable drinking problem fueled a disregard for discipline that resulted in barroom brawls, a reduced playing career, failed marriages and a premature demise in 1948.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/368md4


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Granny women. Appalachia’s midwives. They are usually elder women in the community, the ones people come to with their problems. They do not wear any special garb or have any physical attributes, other than being elderly, that a person can identify them by. The Granny women are recognized throughout the community by their actions. For example, Granny women do not expect to be paid for their services. Furthermore, they are expected to be ethical, and never do harm to another human being. Many Granny women are fundamentalist Christians and are looked to as religious leaders in their communities. Yet they are not in control over anyone. Instead, they are just looked at as wise, good women who unselfishly help the community.

The wisdom of a granny woman is passed down to a family member. Traditionally the arts are given to one female per generation. One belief is that the magical power of a woman is increased during her menstrual cycle; thus, during a woman’s period is the best time for her to learn the ways of a granny woman. Most of the teachings consist of potions from herbs.

“At that time around the `20s and on up through the `30s and all, they had what they called the "midwife," and they'd go and get her and she'd stay around the home until the . . . with the mother till the kid was born. She was just a woman from the country around here at that time. [The granny women] were just trained by experience. Had several kids theirselves and then they'd help someone else to have it, as far as I know. I don't think [babies died in childbirth] any more then than they do now, but might have been more. A lot of time a woman would have a kid by herself right at home. Her man would be away and nobody close and had . . . I know of a few cases like that. They didn't know anything about a nurse at that time, I don't imagine. I never heared much talk about it.”

John Caldwell
b. 1901 Harlan County, KY
Source: http://tinyurl.com/2kz4ft

Source: http://tinyurl.com/36v7lk


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The early decorative arts of Appalachia were the hand-pieced quilts, handwoven coverlets, split oak egg baskets, and other "necessary" crafts once common to every remote household. In the Appalachian mountains, art was often the result of need. The nonindustrialized Appalachian people were self-reliant, making do with materials at hand, crafting the cabins they lived in and all the furnishings, growing the flax and raising the sheep for the carding, spinning, and weaving of cloth for their clothing, and making any needed household implements, farming tools, toys, and bedding from the materials at hand.

The color that came into the Appalachian household came from natural material and natural dyestuffs, from walnut hulls and indigo, from inventive hands and minds adding "art" to everyday living. Intricate weaving patterns and dyes added life to the traditional coverlets, and surely many households contained "showoff" quilts made for marryings and buryings.

Just as the mail order catalog and better transportation began to give the mountaineers access to consumer products and a different, less self-sufficient way of life, a regional movement to preserve and market the traditional crafts got underway. Settlement schools and missionary workers saw the crafts as a means of generating cash income for a cash-poor people, and the "revival" of Appalachia's handicrafts began. The Pi Beta Phi School in Gatlinburg, TN was a leader in the hand weaving arena, both in teaching and production, and the Arrowcraft Shop provided the early market. In Kentucky, Berea College's "Fireside Industries," and in North Carolina, Frances Goodrich's Allanstand Cottage Crafts, the John C. Campbell Folk School, Penland School, and Clementine Douglas's Spinning Wheel Shop provided similar outlets.


In 1929 these efforts merged to create the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, the major organization devoted to Appalachian crafts, which held its first official meeting in Knoxville in 1930. In 1935 the Tennessee Valley Authority created Southern Highlanders, Inc., a crafts marketing program to work in conjunction with the Guild to operate retail stores in Norris, TN, Rockefeller Center in New York City, and in Washington, D.C. The TVA's program also included craft training such as O. J. Mattill's woodworking classes, which gave many Gatlinburg, TN area woodworkers a start in the crafts business.

Garry Barker, Morehead, Kentucky
http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=A026



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Posted by Dave Tabler at 8:39 AM | 0 comments Links to this post    
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When you’re talking with family, are you liable to let down your guard a little and use a bit more Appalachian English and a bit less Standard American English?

For example, the Standard American English word might be faucet, but the Appalachian English version would be spigot. If somebody looks sick, we might say, "he's peaked" (that's peek-ed). Did you hurt your finger? Then we might say you "stoved it up." Some people say "knowed" rather than "knew." We're famous for our double negatives. "I don't have none of that." Our present perfect tense has raised some eyebrows, too. "He's done done it now!" While we’re at it, here’s a little mini-dictionary to amuse the lexicographers:

A little past plumb-----not right in the head
Atter wile-----------------after a while
Back door trots-------------diarreah
Beer Eats-----fastfood joint
Buss-----kiss
Can't put an old head on young shoulders--intelligence differences
Cassins-----tires
Dead dog tired--------- weary
Don't swing so big----don't swing so high
Dreckly-----directly, in a short while
Fast as greased lightning------------speedy
Fixing to-----getting ready to
Full of spunk------------ spirited
Gittin too big for his britches-----conceited
Gommin' up the table------making a mess
Gumption-- drive or spirit
Herrit-----hello
Jerk a knot in your tail-----parent to unruly kid
Juberous----- leery
Made the riffle------ completed a business deal
Nary a one----don't have any at all
Ninny----short for nincompoop
Nussing----- nursing
Peep-Eye-----same as peek-a-boo
Pime blank---exactly
Play purties-----toys
Poor as Job's turkey----------without funds
Reach me that-----give me that
Rue-----regret
Shirky--------doing a job poorly
Shite poke-----skinny, sickly looking
Slop jar-----a chamber pot
Sober as a judge-------sobriety
Spoondiken------also known as 'courting'
This milk's blinky-------spoiled milk
Three sheets in the wind----------intoxicated
Too slow to stop quick---------- pokey
Vittles-----food
Weed monkey----a loose woman
With-----tree branch, used for punishment
Woods colt-----child born out of wedlock



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Posted by Dave Tabler at 8:15 AM | 2 comments Links to this post    
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Listen now while I tell you
Of a story you do not know;
Of a true and trembling brakeman,
And to heaven he did go.

Do you see that train-a-coming,
Oh, it's (?through) old Ninety-nine;
Oh, she's puffing and a-blowing,
For you know she is behind.

See that true and trembling brakeman,
As he signals to the cab;
There is but one chance for him,
And that is to grab.

See that true and trembling brakeman,
As the cars go rushing by;
If he miss that yellow freight car,
He is almost sure to die.

See that true and trembling brakeman,
As he falls beneath the train.
He had not one moment's warning,
Before he fell beneath the train.

See the brave young engineerman,
At the age of twenty-one;
Stepping down from upon his engine,
Crying, "Now what have I done!"

"Is it true I killed a brakeman,
Is it true that he is dying?
Lord, you know I tried to save him,
But I could not stop in time."

See the car wheels rolling o'er him,
O'er his mangled body 'n' head;
See his sister bending o'er him,
Crying, "Brother, are you dead?"

Sighing, "Sister, yes, I'm dying,
Going to a better shore;
Oh, my body's on a pathway,
I can never see no more.

"Sister, when you see my brother,
These few words to him I send;
Tell him never to venture braking,
If he does, his life will end."

These few words were sadly spoken,
Folding his arms across his breast;
And his heart now ceased beating,
And his eyes were closed in death.


Folk ballad credited to Orville Jenks, Jackson County, Ohio


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Posted by Dave Tabler at 8:37 AM | 0 comments Links to this post    
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That would be Wade Mainer, not Bill Monroe. A popular recording and radio personality, Mainer influenced generations of great musicians, including Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley and Doc Watson. With his singing and banjo style, Wade and his band created a distinct sound that bridged the gap between old-time mountain music and bluegrass. Among his innovations was a distinctive two-finger banjo picking style crossing the traditional clawhammer with the modern three-finger picking style used by performers such as Earl Scruggs.

Born April 21, 1907, Mainer grew up on a tiny mountain farm near Weaverville, North Carolina. Old mountain songs were part and parcel of his upbringing and he was greatly influenced by the fiddling of Roscoe Banks, his brother-in-law.

“I was raised in the mountains back then and didn’t go out too much…but what there were of musicians, I would pay attention to them,” says Mainer. “I was interested in the sound of the banjo and when they’d lay there banjos down at the square dance…I’d go over and pick it up and play.”

As a young man, he moved to Concord to work in a cotton mill. Later he joined his brother J.E.'s Mainer Mountaineers, and began performing on radio in 1934. North Carolina was a hotbed of early country musicians during the Depression, and Wade Mainer stood out above the rest. The decade was a great time for brother acts, mostly duets, and mostly featuring close harmony singing with guitars or guitar and mandolin. These duos tended to supplant the larger string bands from the 1920s – traveling was easier, and there were less ways that gig money had to be split up during those hard depression days.

Along with his popular recordings Wade and his brother J.E. reached a wide audience with live radio programs sponsored by a patent medicine laxative called “Crazy Water Crystals.” Wade performed at Radio Stations WBT in Charlotte; WPTF in Raleigh; WNOX in Knoxville; and WPAQ in Mount Airy, among others. The sponsor kept him working but was notoriously stingy with pay causing Wade to part ways with both the sponsor and the Mainer Mountaineers in 1936.

“I didn’t think they was paying me enough at $5 per week…I left them and got me a job at the yarn mill at $12 to $15 per week…and that was gold back then!”
Mainer and fellow bandmate Zeke Morris decided to work as a duet. They split up when Morris' younger brother Wiley joined to form the Morris Brothers. Mainer's new band was named the Sons of the Mountaineers; its first members included guitarists Jay Hugh Hall and Clyde Moody and fiddler Steve Ledford. They performed on the radio and also recorded many songs for Bluebird. In 1939, they had a good-sized hit with "Sparkling Blue Eyes."

Wade married singer/guitarist Julia Brown in 1937. Known as "Hillbilly Lilly," Julia performed from 1935-37 at WSJS RADIO in Winston–Salem, NC. A pioneering female vocalist, Julia would later join her husband for performances on the road.

Sources:
http://www.talentondisplay.com/kicprofiles04.html
http://www.unctv.org/folkways/wade_mainer/index.html
http://www.silcom.com/~peterf/ideas/bigbang_2005.htm



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Posted by Dave Tabler at 8:39 AM | 0 comments Links to this post    
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Cold and flu season’s almost over. These days a quick trip down to the local Walmart will arm the grippe sufferer with every pharmaceutical weapon imaginable. But in 1937 Sam Walton, age 19, was still 25 years away from opening his first Walmart store. Aspirin tablets had already been around since 1915, but there were still plenty of folks back in the hollers who relied on such traditional remedies as the following (don’t do ALL of these simultaneously!):


*Make a tea from the leaves of boneset. Drink the tea when it has cooled. It will make you sick if taken hot. Leaves of this plant may also be cured and saved for use in teas during winter.

*Make a tea from powdered ginger, or ground up ginger roots. Do not boil the tea, but add the powdered root to a cup of hot water and drink. Add honey and whiskey if desired.

*Boil pine needles to make a strong tea.

*Take as much powdered quinine as will stay on the blade of a knife, add to water, and drink.

*Parch red pepper in front of a fire. Powder it, cook it in a tea, and add pur white corn liquor.

*Put goose-grease salve on chest.

*Drink lamb’s tongue and whiskey tea.

*Drink whiskey and honey mixed.

*Drink red pepper tea.

*Eat onions roasted in ashes (good for children.

*Eat a mixture of honey & vinegar.

*Make a tea by putting some pine top needles and boneset in boiling water. You can sweeten it with honey or syrup.

*Drink tea made from wintergreen fern.

*Make a combination tea from boneset leaves and horsemint leaves.

*Take a three-pound can of pine twigs and rabbit tobacco. Boil together and strain. Drink some every three hours, taking no more than one full juice glass within a 12-hour period.

*Drink some of the brine from kraut put up in churn jars. It makes you thirsty, and you’ll drink lots of water.


Source: The Foxfire Book, Anchor Books/Doubleday & Co., New York, 1968



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Posted by Dave Tabler at 8:25 AM | 1 comments Links to this post    
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“Miss [Doris] Ulmann's point of view about the people she photographed was quite simple. She concluded that there would always be someone with a snapshot camera to photograph the pretty girls with frills, dresses and curled hair, made-up eyes and lips. She was concerned not with these people, but with genuine, downright individuals. You had to be an individual, a character more or less, before she was interested in you even a little bit. She photographed a great many doctors.

"She photographed a great many scientists. She photographed musicians and actors. She photographed Italian fruit vendors on Bleeker Street; we made a tour over to Boston where we photographed the Harvard dons. But she felt that all of them had some quality that could be called genuine, and she didn't see them as dressed-up people with pressed pants and well-tied neckties at all.

“She saw beyond that to the person who was doing something. I think she loved most the white mountaineers, the old patriarch types; she loved the old women and the little children, but particularly the old ones. She saw in their faces the care and the trouble of the awful effort they had made to carry on life now that they had reached the afternoon or evening of their days.

"She felt that it was her job to get a good clear impression of it on one of her plates. It was a tremendous opportunity for a city woman, a city-bred woman like Doris, to come into these isolated backwoods places and see the highlanders—see them work and play, see them up close in their houses, sit with them, talk with them, philosophize with them, and finally photograph them. Of course, I took down a good deal of the things that they said, and tried to take down the music they would sing.

“We would pull up in front of someone's house right beside a very nicely paved road, take out the camera, set it up, and I would say, "Folks, we have come to take your picture," and they would line up in a row and that was all there was to it. They would bring down spinning wheels and portions of looms and cards and other things, and show us how their ancestors carried on, and we would photograph them in their granny's old linsey-woolsey dresses.”

—John Jacob Niles
Recounting a 1933-34 photography trip through Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina with photographer Doris Ulmann
[transcribed from a tape recording]
The Call Number, v.19 no.2 Spring 1958. ©University of Oregon


Source: http://boundless.uoregon.edu/cgi-bin/browseresults.exe?CISOROOT=/Ulmann2


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Posted by Dave Tabler at 8:30 AM | 0 comments Links to this post    
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“You might be considered a West Virginian if ... (1) Your front porch collapses and more than six dogs are killed ... (2) Less than half the cars you own actually run ... (3) Your diploma contains the words ‘Trucking Institute’ ... (4) Your wife’s hairdo has ever been caught in a ceiling fan ... (5) You have a rag for a gas cap ... (6) Your brother-in-law is also your uncle.”

"A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken."

“The little boy was heard by his teacher using a most unsuitable word. "Jeffrey," she said, "you should not use that word. Where did you hear it?" "My daddy said it." "Well that does not matter," the teacher explained. "You do not even know what it means." "I do, I do!" Jeffrey corrected. "it means that the car won't start."

"A consultant is a man who knows 49 ways to make love but doesn't know any women."

"Intelligence is like underwear. It's important that we all have it, but it isn't necessary that we show it off."

— James Dent (1928-1992)

James Dent wrote the daily "Gazetteer" column at the Charleston Gazette. Dent was one of those rare writers who occupied a warm spot in the public's heart, because his charming accounts showed a sympathetic understanding of people's daily difficulties. Charleston Mayor Kent Hall, who worked with Dent on a West Virginia University humor magazine when both were students, said Dent had a perfect ear for picking up the humor from a conversation and the rare ability to put it in written form. Dent was an only child, never married. He was a pack-rat and his apartment and office were crammed with books, magazines, newspapers and memos.


Source: www.wvuf.wvnet.edu/scholarships/3s295.htm


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Posted by Dave Tabler at 8:45 AM | 0 comments Links to this post    
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Roy Lee Harmon occupied the post of West Virginia State Poet Laureate three different times, starting in 1937 on through till 1978, some 41 years, becoming Poet Laureate Emeritus in 1979. He had a gift for rhythmic homespun versification that had a strong appeal to Mountain State readers.

At the time of his appointment by the governor, the 36-year old Harmon had been in newspaper work in West Virginia for 18 years. He’d written and syndicated a column for weekly papers entitled "Hillbilly Ballads" for the prior seven years, discontinuing that column when he came to Beckley to accept a position as sports editor of the Beckley Post-Herald.

In addition to writing six books, Harmon founded the West Virginia Poetry Society before he died in 1981. In his last book, published in 1978, he noted that after suffering from a long illness, when he died, "I shall thank God of all creation who has allowed me to live so long in my beloved hills of West Virginia and write my poems.'' He was from Boone County and lived in Beckley, WV for many years.


This was no land for lily-fingered men
Who bowed and danced a neat quadrille,
In towns and cities far beyond the ken
Of mountaineers--who loved each rock and rill.

It was a place for lean, tall men with love
For freedom flowing strongly in their veins,
For those attuned to vagrant stars above,
To rugged peaks, deep snows, and June-time rains.

And so our State was whelped in time of strife
And cut its teeth upon a cannon ball;
Its heritage was cleaner, better life,
Within the richest storehouse of them all.

With timber, oil and gas and salt and coal,
It bargained in the world's huge marketplace.
The mountain empire reached a mighty goal;
It never ran a pauper's sordid race.

And best of all, it sire a hardy flock
Whose fame will grow with centuries to be,
Tough as a white-oak stump or limestone rock,
The mountaineers who always shall be free.


Source:
http://tinyurl.com/2wvtax
http://tinyurl.com/2jt63d

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Posted by Dave Tabler at 9:00 AM | 2 comments Links to this post    
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“The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is an independent public corporation founded by Congress in 1933 to control flooding, improve navigation, assist farmers, provide cheap electric power, and make "surveys of and general plans for [the Tennessee River] basin and adjoining territory . . . for the general purpose of fostering an orderly and proper physical, economic, and social development of the Tennessee Valley.”
---The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture

Ernestine: “In the 1930s they kept coming through saying they were surveying, they was going to build a dam there and I just couldn't believe it. Byron Denman, Bob Poage, Sanderfords from Belton came through. It was impossible to imagine because it was just farmlands and cedars, just a beautiful valley.

“We were heartbroken...it was the only place I knew as home. It was sad...house moved in 1953...land began to fill in 1954. It (the water) came up and spread out easy...1957 flood - it almost filled then...'91 and '92 it overflowed again...Bert asked a corps engineer ‘How long will it take that to fill up and run over?’ and he said ‘You'll probably never live to see it, it will be at least 100 years.’ I wish I knew where he was! and tell him that I did see it!"

"Mrs. Byron Denman, bless her heart, he worked so hard to get that in there (their farm in the valley) and I believe it hurt her worse than it hurt him. She just nearly had a nervous breakdown over it. They moved to Temple and bought a place over there. Miss Nora's mother and grandmother lived there with her when we moved to Sparta in the early 1930s. She was an only child (Walton). They were about the richest people in the community. She dressed, she had her gloves and her hat.

Bert: "I never did give it too much of a thought because I blocked it out, our homeplace being covered up. But it is kind of like just laying down and letting water cover you up, that's just the way I feel. It was a live burial, in a way. And of course, for Daddy, that's the way they make their living (from the land) so it was even worse for them.

"Dad moved to Heidenhammer when the dam went in. The old Cummins family. Then to Salado. And so many people didn't know where they were going to go, they just had to get out and find a place."

Ernestine Humphrey & Bert Bounds
Sparta, TN residents 1931-1954

Source: http://bellnetweb.brc.tamus.edu/res_grid/mspubs/oralhist.htm

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Posted by Dave Tabler at 8:15 AM | 0 comments Links to this post    
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