Appalachian Cultural History

Located in Mount Airy, North Carolina, WPAQ Radio aired its first broadcast in February 1948 and has since served its community by broadcasting the music of the region, specializing in old-time and bluegrass. By the late 1940s America had witnessed almost three decades of radio history, and many stations had become well known for their country barn dances. Radio helped to change the “hillbilly” music of the 1920s into mainstream country music, a lucrative industry since the 1940s controlled in large part by record companies and commercial advertisers. The music no longer retained its simple ensemble format, but rather evolved into a style dominated by stars.
However, not all stations welcomed the change in the music so clearly identified with rural America. Since WPAQ’s first broadcast, Ralph Epperson, the station’s sole proprietor, has been using a mass medium to fight mass media in efforts to protect the regional heritage. In this thesis I will seek to explain the apparent anomaly of WPAQ as one of the few radio stations in America that have continued to broadcast old-time and bluegrass music in the face of commercial pressures to air more mainstream music.
Though various articles have documented episodes within the extensive history of WPAQ, this research investigates and presents a more detailed and comprehensive account of the station. This will be achieved by combining documentation with interviews and archives. In addition, I will argue for WPAQ’s importance in 
ethnomusicology and American music as a preserver of one of America’s distinct musical cultures.

With the materials presented in this sourcebook, students will learn about American geography. They will learn about the economy, industries, and natural resources from the Appalachian area. They will acquire new vocabulary and get a chance to put that new vocabulary to use. They will learn about Appalachian dialects and folk beliefs. They will listen to music, poetry, and stories from the region, and have the chance to creatively express themselves by writing folk pieces of their own. They will make connections between their native culture and the Appalachian culture.

Melungeons, a tri-racial isolate in the Southern Highlands, are at the center of a surprising diversity of genes in the Lower Appalachians. Among the ethnic contributions to this "crazy quilt" ancestry are Jews, Gypsies, Portuguese, Scotsmen and others. 24. This paper incorporates the only academic genetic survey, Donald N. Yates and Elizabeth C. Hirschman, “Toward a Genetic Profile of Melungeons in Southern Appalachia,” Appalachian Journal 38/1 (Fall 2010) 92-111.

The Middle Woodland period in eastern North America witnessed a fluorescence of monumental architecture and material exchange linked to widespread networks of ritual interaction. Although these networks encompassed large geographic areas and persisted for several centuries, extant archaeological models have tended to characterize Middle Woodland interaction as an historically unitary process. Using new data from the Garden Creek site in North Carolina, I argue that these frameworks obscure important historical shifts in Middle Woodland interaction. Recent collections-based research, geophysical survey, targeted excavation, and 14C dating (including Bayesian modeling) of this site reveal two coeval diachronic changes: a shift from geometric earthwork construction to platform mound construction; and a shift from the production of special artifacts (mica, crystal quartz), to the consumption of exotic artifacts in association with platform mound ceremonialism. These data hint at important changes in interregional relationships between the Appalachian Summit, the Hopewellian Midwest, and the greater Southeast during the Middle Woodland period, and provide a springboard for considering how processes of culture contact contributed to pre-Columbian cultural change.

One of the worst mining disasters in U.S, History, the Buffalo Creek disaster did not take place in a mine but in a community as the result of inadequate and inappropriate mining activities.  Homes, lives, and communities were destroyed in the wake of this historic flood.

Ever wonder what it would be like to hike 2,174 miles from Georgia to Maine along the world’s longest continuously marked footpath? Join “Marathon” as he provides a humorous autobiographical account of a “real” walk in the woods. Anyone who enjoys travel or adventure will love Marathon’s story. This book is required reading for any outdoor enthusiast and will certainly assist anyone wanting to plan an Appalachian Trail (AT) section or thru-hike. Live vicariously through this entertaining account, which includes over 350 accompanying pictures. This book is the culmination of 34 articles that were written for the author’s hometown newspaper as he thru-hiked the entire AT. All articles were written while still on the trail. Appendices also include the author’s daily mileage and location log, his thru-hike equipment list, a suggested AT readings list, and a comprehensive collection of reflective thoughts and suggestions by another AT thru-hiker, “Bonespur.”

Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, publishers issued books with decorative covers designed to evoke images of the settings and tales they enclosed. These decorated books, known as publishers' bindings, were used as marketing tools to attract customers and increase sales. The designs served two purposes: a means to corner the market with an attractive product and meet manufacturing requirements that necessitated the repetitive stamping of cover images in quick succession in order to meet demand.

Originally published in Art and Community Change: Exploring Cultural Development Policies, Practices and Dilemmas by Max Stephenson, Jr. and A. Scott Tate.

This chapter reports the search by a rural, professional theater company (Appalshop's Roadside Theater) for a cultural development paradigm that utilizes the inherent intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and material traditions and features of a community to encourage individual agency in support of community well-being.

This paper is a feminist reading four short stories by Breece D'J Pancake. This paper demonstrates that these four stories show the lack of voice given to women, the reduction of women to sexual objects, or whores, and the treatment and description of women in animalistic terms all emphasize their objectification and further convey the idea that this is a male-dominated, patriarchal world and the female is insignificant. The ambiguous nature of these stories leaves the reader wondering whether this depiction of Pancake’s Appalachia is generalizable to the entire Appalachian culture; however, it cannot be determined if Pancake was perpetuating these stereotypes intentionally without digging into and attempting to determine authorial intent, but it can be safely assumed that these stereotypes drive the characters in his stories. By reducing these women to insignificant figures, the men have elevated their manliness. If these stories are read between the lines, one can see that these women have more to offer than the way they are treated and described in these stories, but as they are on the surface, which is how the men see them, they are insignificant in a male-dominated patriarchal world.

Chapter 5 from Women, Music and Faith in Central Appalachia, the constructive theological response from a process feminist perspective to theodicy in Central Appalachian and urban Appalachian women's theographia (songs, art, artifacts, journals, letters). Originally published under my then married compound name (pre-transition), Heather Ann Ackley Bean.

Pitta ‘mpigliata is an example of an iconic Calabrian Christmas pastry’s evolution and its persistence into a global diasporic network.
http://bloggers.iitaly.org/bloggers/41629/pitta-mpigliata-calabrian-christmas-pastry-diaspora
Publication date: 2017
Publication name: I-Italy bloggers. Free online

Many Mountains, Much News
Digitizing Appalachia’s Historic Newspapers
Appalachian Studies Association Conference 2015

For centuries, newspapers in Appalachia were a vitally important source for reporting local and state news.  Their pages circulated through the many mountains of Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, carrying the first reports from the massacre at Matewan, through the Civil War and the fight for the 19th amendment to the US Constitution.  Now the pages and papers coveted by the great-great-great-grandparents of today’s Appalachians can be read once again through the Library of Congress website and their newspaper portal: Chronicling America.  Three universities, West Virginia University, The University of Tennessee, and the University of Kentucky, and the Library of Virginia, are digitizing Appalachia’s historic newspapers from the late eighteen century through the early years of the twentieth century as recipients of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

This session will discuss various aspects of the digitization process and highlight actual newspaper stories now available on the Chronicling America website.

Joe Steiff’s poignant solo show about growing up gay in rural Appalachia is sad and funny, the nostalgia cut with a keen hindsight that’s piercingly honest.  An old-fashioned storyteller, he spins his tale in a soothing voice that takes us into his hometown of 300 souls, where there are guns in the glove box, people play bluegrass on the front porch, and young gay men are abandoned by their family, friends, and community. … Steiff takes the mundane details of his young adulthood and makes magic.
-- Jennifer Vanasco, Chicago Reader, “Critic’s Choice,” Highly Recommended

Originally published in the book An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art, 2013.

Editor Todd London describes this seminal essay by Roadside Artistic Director Dudley Cocke as ”less a picture of a founding vision than the articulation of an evolving one–and the specific ideas and practices that grow to fulfill that vision.”

Chronologically from earliest to latest in eastern North America, the Ice Sheet retreated north, eventually to central Quebec. As suitable forage grew on the deglaciated surface for caribou, they went north as Appalachian summit calving grounds became forested and unsafe for caribou due to increased wolf presence. As pregnant female caribou summit-hopped their calving north with herds keeping their altitudinal migrations, they changed to distance migrators in the Maritimes and around the Great Lakes, and then to Ungava, forming the ancestors of the George River herd. Readers are encouraged to read “Bergerud et al. 2008: The Return of Caribou to Ungava”. As herds moved north from Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky, they were at first followed by Clovis and Cumberland fluted point hunters whose descendants stylistically changed their point forms to Gainey, Barnes, Debert, etc. Plano hunters passing the Great Lakes and descending the St. Lawrence River merged with the latest fluted point hunters, later forming Early Archaic caribou hunters in the northern Maritimes and Interior Quebec and Labrador

For centuries, newspapers in Appalachia were a vitally important source for reporting local and state news.  Their pages circulated through the many mountains of Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, carrying the first reports from the massacre at Matewan, through the Civil War and the fight for the 19th amendment to the US Constitution.  Now the pages and papers coveted by the great-great-great-grandparents of today’s Appalachians can be read once again through the Library of Congress website and their newspaper portal: Chronicling America.  Three universities, West Virginia University, The University of Tennessee, and the University of Kentucky, and the Library of Virginia, are digitizing Appalachia’s historic newspapers from the nineteenth century through the early years of the twentieth century as recipients of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

Military Camp newspapers from this period are few and far between, reflecting the movement of troops, the availability of soldiers skilled as newspapermen, and the proximity of a usable press.  These papers document the continuing flux of the military during the war, the development of western Virginia as it strives for independence from Virginia and the need to support and bolster the morale of their troops.  Few copies survive and those that do are extremely valuable for their reports of daily life, the publication of popular songs and humorous sketches, and reports on battles, politics and troop movements.

This blog post explores the history of Storer College, from its humble beginnings as a primary school founded in 1865 by the Reverend Nathan Cook Brackett to educate the children of former slaves, to its development as a fully fledged college granting degrees to African American men and women, Storer College became the first institution of higher learning for African-Americans in the State.  Located in Harper’s Ferry near the site of John Brown’s 1859 attack on the Federal Armory, Storer College represented the freedom Civil War African-Americans hoped to achieve.

This conference presentation explores the double life of lepidopterist and coal baron William Henry Edwards’ (1822 – 1909).  Although born in New York, Edwards spent most of his adult life in Coalburg, a small town outside Charleston, West Virginia.  As a co-founder of the Kanawha and Ohio Coal Company, Edwards moved to Coalburg in order to be closer to his mining operations.  However, the real love of his life was butterflies and despite managing the day to day operations of his coal mining operations, Edwards spent thirty years of his life capturing, descripting and producing the greatest nineteenth century masterwork on Lepidoptera.

The Steve Earle song “Hillbilly Highway” tells the story of three generations of Appalachian residents. Beginning with an outmigration to Detroit for the prospects of economic opportunity, the song ends with the protagonist following the music back home. This article follows Appalachian Music on a similar journey as it cyclically influences the broader American popular music landscape while consistently enjoying phases of returning to its “roots” through revivals of past sounds. Specifically, this article views the history of Appalachian music as one of a ritual economy within which complex forces of politics, economics, and culture shape and change the music but in a circular, rather than linear, fashion.

American popular music is often viewed through a framework of political economy. As dominant genres such as Pop, Rock, and Country/Western (a direct descendant of Appalachian music) continue the process of commodification, and become less and less connected to the aesthetic ideals of music as an art form, political economy becomes an excellent interpreter of the processes at work within them. Yet political economy fails to fully understand folk traditions such as the music of Appalachia because it does not adequately account for cultural forces that motivate audiences at a deeper level than politics and economy. The ritual economy view helps to explain the empirically observable longevity of Appalachian music, the cyclical revival of interest by the greater popular music industry, and may help to predict the sustainability of Appalachian music in the future.

This article (online at the link) is based on interviews with Thomas Townsend and R. Rex Stephenson in May 2006 at Ferrum College. While teaching English in China, Townsend found that students enjoyed the Appalachian Jack Tales he had learned while working with Stephenson's Jack Tale Players and Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre. This article appeared in The Franklin News-Post [Rocky Mount, VA], June 19, 2006, with the title “China Students Learn about Jack Tales.”  Minor revisions included in this version were made in July 2007 .