A Few Honest Words

New in late October from University Press of Kentucky comes Jason Howard's A Few Honest Words:  The Kentucky Roots of Popular Music.  Howard, who co-authored Something's Rising:  Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal with Kentucky's literary favorite son, Silas House, is currently a James Still Fellow at the University of Kentucky.  His features, essays, and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Nation, Sojourners, Paste, No Depression, and The Louisville Review, and his commentary has been featured on NPR.

A Few Honest Words contains a foreword by none other than the great Rodney Crowell who has this to say about the book, "Jason Howard has crafted a thoughtful and loving homage to his beloved state of Kentucky, giving us pitch-perfect journalistic prose from the heart of the country."

I am most impressed by the creative nonfiction treatment Howard gives to his interview subjects. This could be yet another interview-type book about famous musicians if it weren't for the author's almost cinematic bent for immersing his reader into the world, the room, the mannerisms, the memories, and the stories of his subjects in every chapter. I have roared up the side of a mountain in the back of a pickup truck with Matraca Berg, experienced a lesson in jazz improvisation from Morehead State professor, Jay Flippin  with jazz pianist Kevin Harris, felt proud at having "Nappy Roots Day" declared by the Governor of Kentucky, and shared a glimpse into the inspiration for Joan Osborne's hit song "One of Us." All of these intimate experiences come to the reader through Howard's conscious structuring of each chapter where an important theme is revealed early on through a focused image, then the interview subject gradually unfolds relevant life events to Howard that function like improvised variations on that theme, and finally each chapter concludes with coming home to the theme.  There is an almost A-B-A musical construction inherent in this treatment that I find both familiar and pleasing, as both a musician and a reader.

If a reader picks up A Few Honest Words expecting a who's-who of famous Kentucky musicians over the generations, she might be disappointed.  While important influences like Bill Monroe, Lionel Hampton, Loretta Lynn, Jean Ritchie, The Everly Brothers and many others are acknowledged, most of the subjects for this work are current, working musicians in roots music who feel the profound influence of place at work in their craft.  Therefore, the roots genres discussed in this book range from the popular country songs of the Judds to the hip-hop of Nappy Roots, from the Bakersfield sound of Dwight Yoakum to Louisville jam band, and from the delicate folk renderings of Daniel Martin Moore to the plucky bluegrass stylings of Dale Ann Bradley.

The book opens with a chapter on Naomi Judd who joined Howard for his reading at the Southern Book Festival in Nashville recently.  The title--A Few Honest Words--comes from a Ben Sollee tune.  Sollee is also featured in the book along with other Kentucky musicians who have been active in the struggle against mountaintop removal like Jim James of My Morning Jacket and Kate Larken.  Nashville songwriters, Matraca Berg and Chris Knight, singer song writer and trad musician Carla Gover, gospel singer and theatre producer, Cathy Rawlings and indie rockers, the Watson Twins are among those also presented.

Perhaps my favorite passage in A Few Honest Words comes in a sidebar of the Kevin Harris chapter called "The Magic of Jazz" where the pianist traces his musical philosophy back to where he first heard his junior high band director play "Georgia on My Mind" on the piano. Says, Harris, "He played the tune, started to improvise a bit, and then came back to it. And that transition, being able to transform something like that, and then come back--it's like being a magician."  Harris goes on to say that years of playing have given him new insight into that process. He learned that whatever he was doing to the music, that transformation was also happening to him and the audience by making everything connect.

The structure of A Few Honest Words by Jason Howard winks a knowing eye at that kind of musical magic by transforming the reader with words that make everything connect. Howard skillfully brings each chapter back home to each musician's Kentucky roots, making much musical and literary sense.

This review aired on WVXU's Around Cincinnati on November 18, 2012.

You can listen to the review at this link:  Click here to listen to the review.

Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky

New this June from University Press of Kentucky's oral history series comes a compelling work from Nora Rose Moosnick entitled Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity. Moosnick reveals in the preface that she came to this project as a way to honor two men she loved, her father, Monroe Moosnick and her adopted grandfather, Mousa Ackall, whose Palestinian family became melded with her own Jewish family through a mutual knowledge of fabrics.  The author speculates that the Moosnicks and the Ackalls might have been drawn together out of an appreciation of their likenesses and an understanding of the odd position they held as Jews and Arabs in Kentucky.

As Nora Rose Moosnick set out to honor these two important men in her life through chronicling the stories of other Arab and Jewish merchant families in Kentucky, she found that women's stories in particular offered an appreciation of Arabs' and Jews' lives in their new surroundings through the overlap between them.  As a sociologist, Moosnick acknowledges that Kentucky harbors a larger story about immigrants settling in places not usually associated with them.  And strangely enough, the author suggests that it may be in places like Kentucky where Arabs and Jews are most apt to discover their likenesses.

Grounded in oral history while informed in research practices, the book is not intended to be an academic work.  Moosnick tells the stories of ten Arab and Jewish women while aiming to confound simplistic notions that states--like Kentucky-- in the Appalachian region lack diversity. The author asserts that the stories of these women tend to speak to larger themes. They tell similar tales about public service to communities, mother-daughter relationships, the agility required to work, mother and be an active community member, and what it meant to be an Arab or Jewish mother nearly a century ago.

In the chapter entitled "Publicly Exceptional," Moosnick looks at the lives of Jewish fashion entrepreneurs Sarah and Frances Myers  who sold high-end women's clothing in Hopkinsville in their family shop, Arnold's. Although socially rebellious--the sisters were known for holding poolside cocktail parties on Sundays during the 1960s--their shop was a gathering place for many in Hopkinsville who described it as a "salon." Socially prominent women frequented both their parties and the shop.

This chapter also inspects the life of former Lexington mayor, Teresa Isaacs, whose political career is firmly rooted in her family, the family business, and her Arab American identity. Her family legend includes enterprising Lebanese ancestors who settled in coal country to work as shopkeepers and peddlers until Isaac's grandparents established a theatre business. Isaac's political bent was probably influenced by her father's term as mayor of Cumberland in the 1960s, but community service loomed large in her family's history in Appalachia.  As a Christian Arab, she has sometimes been accused by political opponents of being a terrorist.  Since Isaacs completely embraces her Arab heritage and her Christian roots, she finds easy allies in both the Muslim community(with whom she shares "blood ties") and the Jewish community(with whom she shares the Old Testament.) In fact, when her political enemies attacked, it was members of the Jewish community who came to her aid, distributing flyers that disputed any connection with extremists.

Moosnick's book also examines Arab and Jewish mothers in the 21st Century and how they balance their working lives with child rearing. She dedicates much discussion to how some Jewish and Arab families established businesses to elevate their children to the professional class, only to dissolve those businesses when their children achieved the desired success. She concludes the book by comparing two family stories of archetypal women from the distant past named "Rose" one of whom is her own Jewish grandmother and another who is Rose Rowady, who left Lebanon in 1909.  Both stories were related to Moosnick by the women's elderly sons.

In the preface of Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky,  Nora Rose Moosnick has this comment about her work:  "in some sense, I am going through an attic. I  hope you find gifts, as I have in what I have uncovered."  The real, examined lives of Arab and Jewish women in Kentucky--who share more in common than we may have imagined--are gifts to the reader for understanding the complexities of our stories.

(This review aired on Around Cincinnati on October 14, 2012.  Here is an audio link for listening to the review:

Listen!)

France 2012

I went to France this past June with my mother-in-law, her daughters, her grand daughter, and her belle filles(daughters-in-law.)  We were a crew of six women ranging from the 20s to the 80s visiting Paris, Normandie and Versailles in a whirlwind tour.  Hope you enjoy the photo book I just made for Mimi, who doesn't do computers.

Click here to view this photo book larger

Shutterfly offers exclusive layouts and designs so you can make your book just the way you want.

Kentucky Folktales

I was crossing a hot college parking lot in Tennessee, on my way to a CREATE Conference, when a man came up along side me to introduce himself as a storyteller from New Mexico. "What about you?'  he asked me, as we kept up the brisk pace toward the opening session. "I'm a songwriter and singer from Kentucky," I countered. "Kentucky!" He seemed delighted.  "Then you must know Mary Hamilton."

This wasn't my first experience with a storyteller from another state assuming that we all know Mary Hamilton. She is that well-known among storytellers. So, when her first book from the University of Kentucky Press, Kentucky Folktales: Revealing Stories, Truths, and Outright Lies, was published this month, I was only too happy to give it a read.

The fact is, I have known Mary Hamilton since around 1999, when she and my trio Raison D'Etre were both juried into Kentucky's Performing Arts Directory.  Plus she and I have spent many summer training sessions together as part of Kentucky's Teaching Artist Roster. Mary is well-respected in the storytelling world and was instrumental in organizing Kentucky's Storytelling Association. I suspected her book would be more than just a collection of tales.

And, I was right.  The book offers a personal introduction to Mary, who openly proclaims herself as "a professional storyteller since 1983."  Following each of the 26 tales in the collection is an essay that discusses either variations and origin of the story--many gleaned from Mary's 2010 Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship at Berea--or some description of how Mary adapted the tale to fit her way of telling.  Truly, the book offers a glimpse into the artistry of the teller.

That Mary began her volume with scary tales could not have pleased me more. Stories like "Stormwalker," "Promises to Keep," and "The Blue Light" are eerie enough to hold a reader's interest on their own. But, the essays following each story explain how Mary uses song, repetition, and various hand motions to add to each tale's power. She also shares with the reader where she encountered each story and the process she used to make the tale part of her repertoire.

It would be hard to pick out favorites from this collection, but I especially enjoyed the one entitled "Some Dog" from the section entitled "Tall Tales and Outright Lies." Anybody who's had a particularly wonderful dog will appreciate the embellished deeds of this hound. And the trick tale called "The Fortune Teller" has some physical humor and surprise in it that made me want to try telling the story to an unsuspecting family member. Mary credits a Kentucky middle school teacher with telling this story to her for the first time. She includes the trick story in the "More Kentucky Folktales" section.

Another great story from the "More Kentucky Folktales" section is "Rawhead and Bloody Bones."  Despite it's less than savory title, the story has some enchanting repetition passages that truly create images in the mind's eye of the two main characters' kindness and cruelty. Following the tale, Mary discusses why she decided to include certain phrases like "she acted ugly" to help the listener form the necessary images for a full understanding of motivation.

The section called "Beyond Kentucky Folktales" introduces stories that do not come from Kentucky, but since they are now being told by a Kentucky teller, will no doubt become more Kentucky-like when filtered through both her technique and her listeners. The author shares examples from India, Scotland, and Japan in this section along with her amusing stories of how she acquired and adapted each tale.

In the final section of the book, Mary Hamilton shares some family stories, including one about her when she was a baby,  and several on the theme of family mistakes. I want to share just one of these with you, so you can get the hang of how Mary's family life has been important to her becoming a storyteller:

It's called "Jeff Rides the Rides." (p.169)...

Mary Hamilton's first book--a collection of tales and her commentary on each one--is a must-have for anyone considering telling a good tale. And for those of us who mostly sit and listen, Kentucky Folktales provides some really good stories along with a little peek behind the scenes at the mind who tells them.

This review aired on the July 1st broadcast of Around Cincinnati. Listen to the entire review at this link:
Listen to the review here.

Dear Appalachia

In Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction Since 1878,  Assistant Professor of Appalachian Studies, Emily Satterwhite, explores the responses of readers to best-selling fiction set in the region.  Published in November 2011 by University Press of Kentucky, Dear Appalachia uses an innovative research method--that of sifting through fan mail and reviews to better understand the relationship between reader and text. Satterwhite, also a teacher of American studies and popular culture at Virginia Tech, discovers how readers have imagined the region and what purposes these imagined geographies have served for them.

Satterwhite received the Weatherford Award March 23rd at the Appalachian Studies Conference hosted by Indiana University of Pennsylvania.  This award is given for the best nonfiction book in Appalachian studies published each year. Her colleague at Virginia Tech and department chair, Anita Puckett, congratulated her at the gathering of academics by explaining, "there is no higher award for scholarship in Appalachian Studies."

This scholarly work is organized into five chapters, each dealing with best sellers during a particular historic framework, a conclusion that sums up the author's assertions, and an impressive appendix which includes a methodological essay, notes, bibliography and index.

Chapter One, entitled "Charm and Virility," offers a fascinating discussion of fan reaction to a literary surprise in the late 1800s.  When popular local color author, Charles Egbert Craddock who readers and editors alike assumed was a "strapping six-foot Tennessean," turned out to be Mary N. Murfrees, "a genteel, delicate-looking lady." the editor of The Atlantic Monthly was astonished. Satterwhite examines reviews of Murfree's work and charts fan mail from her readers to show differences in how the author was perceived by her audience. Metropolitan readers tended to construct the author of In the Tennessee Mountains as a virile, self-taught adventurer who provided a masculizing frontier for "his" readers. Murfree's writing style--even after it was well-known that she was a woman--was praised by metropolitan reviewers for its "force" and "masculinity" of style.  City dwellers during the 1800s were worried that men were too coddled by cities and looked to local color writing for something not "namby pamby," as one reviewer classified Murfree.

Fan mail from small town readers often testified to the authenticity of Murfree's jargon and the distance these small town elites felt from the quaint character of her collection.. Many of these letters were written by aspiring local color writers who saw the author as a member of their own elite circle. Satterwhite concludes that both groups of readers seemed to be drawn to the local color genre because it provided a kind of vicarious tourism to the mountains.

Chapter Two looks at the popularity of John Fox, Jr.'s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine circa 1908. Satterwhite examines two prevalent views of this book through the filters of three categories of readers: nationally identified readers, locally identified readers, and transitional readers.  A prevailing view of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is that it promotes imperialism by painting moonshiners as inferior but redeemable. Another view holds that the author possesses "an intimate knowledge of mountain people." While Satterwhite acknowledges that she tends to agree with Fox's detractors, she investigates why the book struck a chord with so many early 20th Century readers.

She finds that nationally identified readers turned to Fox's work as an anti-modernist tonic. The books seems to celebrate mountain quaintness for these readers while nationalizing industrial intervention.  Locally identified readers saw themselves fictionalized as stereotypical buffoons and were offended. Much of Chapter Two develops an interesting theory--based on the novel's fan mail--of why this book gained tremendous popularity among migratory readers who felt ambivalence about "home" vs. "the industrial world." Fox's authenticity and the book's wide appeal seem to come from middle class readers who had sought to better themselves by leaving home, and then felt homesickness, a conflict Fox understood well from his own displacement from small town Kentucky while searching for upward mobility.

Chapter 3 entitled "Country to City" discusses the work of Harriet Simpson Arnow, in particular her two novels, Hunter's Horn and The Dollmaker.  Even though both works are characterized by Satterwhite as unlikely best sellers since they are, in her words, "long and bleak," an analysis of fan mail reveals that readers' needs were met by Arnow's authenticity. Arnow was credited by scholars as capturing an accurate vision of mountain life while attracting readers who identified with her characters, particularly the large group of Appalachian migrants who moved to the cities for work in the 1940s and 50s. Her fiction also served conventional readerly desires for authentic places, belonging and a sense of power.

Chapter 4 entitled "City to Country" examines the turbulent period of 1967-1970 and the wildly popular best sellers, Christy and Deliverance.  These two pop culture touchstones, as different as two novels can be, still continue to shape national perceptions of the Appalachian region. Fan mail indicates that both books served white, high middlebrow readers in the same way that local color fiction worked for the Gilded Age and Neo-Gilded Age audiences. These readers wanted the production of region as authentic, the construction of identity and belonging by way of geographical affiliations, and the circulation of power.

Fan mail for both books confirms that readers saw Appalachia as a distinctive world apart.  The novels provide mountaineers who relate a supposed colorful collective past for white culture through preservation of folklore and music. While Christy's 1912 pastoral setting provides a quiet place of God-fearing self-reliance, Deliverance  readers sought titillation and reassurance that Appalachia permits  the primitive to endure in the modern world.

Chapter 5 looks at the resurgence of local color writing beginning with the 1985 publication of the best-selling Lake Wobegon Days by public radio icon, Garrison Keillor. Satterwhite points to a second Gilded Age from 1985-2008, called by some scholars the Neo-Gilded Age, which shares with the first Gilded Age certain historic qualities. Among these are large gaps between rich and poor, high levels of unregulated corporate power, conspicuous degrees of consumption, influxes of immigration, and expanded U.S. activities abroad. In both the Gilded and Neo-Gilded Ages, high middlebrow readers expressed concern for loss of local cultures.

In this chapter, Satterwhite uses online reader reviews to examine how four best-selling novels set in Appalachia touch a nerve with a wide swath of readers. In particular, she looks at how At Home in Mitford, Big Stone Gap, Clay's Quilt, and Cold Mountain meet reader needs for authentic place, community, belonging and identity.

Emily Satterwhite warns in her concluding chapter of some unintended consequences of the imaginary versions of Appalachia created by readers, such as the potential to reinforce white nationalism or endorse problematic images of so-called primitives around the world.  Moving beyond traditional examinations of regional fiction, Dear Appalachia is an innovative study that reveals how narratives function in the lives of readers.

***This review aired on "Around Cincinnati" on April 29, 2012, WVXU 91.7.  You can listen to the review here:

Audio link for this review.

Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia

While watching a U.S. military official apologize to Afghans on the news over the unfortunate burning of copies of the Koran, I was taken aback by the characterization of the Afghan protestors as "primitive." The official seemed to be attributing the protestors' reaction to the gaffe as illogical or intrinsic-- the kind of behavior one might expect from a people who are not totally civilized.

Yet, on our own soil, areas of the United States have been characterized over our history as innately more dangerous and primitive because of their supposed isolation or cultural proclivity toward violence. In Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia, Bruce E. Stewart, assistant professor of history at Appalachian State, collects essays from experts in the fields of political science, history, and literature to question the supposedly innate brutality of the Appalachian people. Published in January by University Press of Kentucky, this book examines cases of violence in the mountains from the late 18th Century through the early 20th Century, making the case that violence in the hills is not isolated or inbred, but reflective of deeper problems within the United States itself.

In his introduction to the essays, Stewart shares prevalent explanations offered by early scholars and writers about the causes of violent behavior in Appalachia. Among those discussed are rugged frontier individualism caused by living in the wilderness, Scotch-Irish descent, and geographic isolation.

Arnold J. Toynbee, in his 1946 work, A Study of History, characterized the (quote) "barbarizing effect of the American frontier" (end quote) on Appalachian residents. Toynbee's explanation follows the late nineteenth century popularization by novelists, missionaries, and scholars of a violent and lawless Appalachia. Toynbee argued that mountain violence was a product of living on the frontier. Forced to live in "the wilderness" where they had to defend themselves against Native Americans, Appalachian whites were thought to have lapsed into savagery, a condition that future generations presumably failed to rise above, according to this theory.

Many early twentieth century writers, however, argued that the Appalachian mountains were peopled largely with descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers who carried with them a "border culture" that included clannish behavior, and a cultural propensity to break the law and fight to defend property. Horace Kephart wrote in 1921, "They--the Scotch-irish--are a fighting race."

Stewart cites the most popular explanation for mountain violence accepted among early scholars as geographic isolation . By the turn of the twentieth century, most writers, educators and missionaries asserted that the mountains served as physical barriers keeping civilization out. C.T. Revere wrote in 1907 that mountain people "had never come in contact with the outside world, and are amazingly ignorant of anything which happens outside their immediate neighborhood." Revere and other writers of the time supposed that this isolation resulted in a peculiar mountain culture where highlanders became "extreme individualists."

Stewart goes on to present more recent challenges to these early theories about mountain violence, including the 1978 work of Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind. In his book, Shapiro wrote that the notion of Appalachia as out of step with the rest of America was a post-Civil War construct to make Appalachia "the other," a fictional place filled with natural beauty and populated with backward people who did not embrace progress. This notion gave crusading Victorian Americans the incentive to intervene in the lives of the deprived other, uplifting them toward the civilized world of industrialization.

Shapiro's work inspired other scholars to take a closer look at the cultural explanations for violence in Appalachia. Studies found the region to be more culturally diverse than described earlier with inhabitants who had ancestors from not just Scotch-Irish descent, but also from Welsh, English, German, Italian, Native American, and African lineages, thus debunking the theory of a homogeneous Scotch-Irish "border culture" that espoused violence.

The thirteen essays in this collection serve to cast each instance of Appalachian violence under the prism of history, examining each for complex causes including racial tension, economic inequality, governmental instability, class struggles, politically-motivated infighting, and land disputes. In other words, the kinds of forces that have caused violence throughout our nation at large were also at work in the mountains.

There is an interesting discussion of feuding in T.R.C. Hutton's essay, "Assassins and Feudists: Politics and Death in the Bluegrass and Mountains of Kentucky" where politicians found it expedient to blame political violence on the reputation of "bloody Breathitt" in order to hide corruption. A very compelling account of the state of Franklin which was formed briefly in the 1780s from western North Carolina also makes for interesting analysis. On the surface, the secession of Franklin from North Carolina seemed to be over a federal law requiring states with substantial western lands to cede them to the federal government. But in a closer examination of the historic forces, Kevin T. Barksdale reveals clashes for land with the Overhill Cherokee and a "divide and conquer" policy by one of North Carolina's governors to be instrumental in the bloodshed that eventually ensued. Bruce Stewart's own contribution, to the collection involves the negative image of moonshiners painted by writers of the local color genre in the 1870s.

In fact, many of the contributors to Blood in the Hills credit national press and literary genres with perpetuating the stereotypes of mountain violence. By providing a more complete picture of one region where violence has been exaggerated and misunderstood, Stewart gives the reader a better understanding of violence throughout the entire United States.

This review originally aired on Around Cincinnati on March 11, 2012, WVXU 91.7. You may listen to the archived review at the audio link to the right of this blog.

My Bold Kentucky Home

Since 1999, Raison D'Etre(my folk trio) has been included in the Kentucky Arts Council's Performing Arts Directory. Because of that honor, we have appeared on In Performance at the Governor's Mansion, showcased at the Performing Arts Exchange, and been afforded the chance to be among those performing and selling product at one of the nation's top arts and crafts show, Kentucky Crafted: the Market.

If you've never been to the Market, it includes visually stunning arts and crafts and is jam-packed with literary, musical, culinary, architectural, dramatic and dance events. There's so much to do and see(not to mention buy) that three of my college friends are coming from all points in the Commonwealth to spend the weekend in Lexington…kind of a midpoint meet-up destination for them.

Raison D'Etre is happy to be scheduled for the Kentucky Stage on one of the public days of the event, March 4 at 12 noon. We'll also get to play for the trade traffic on March 1 at 5 pm. And I am very excited to share one of my loves--in fact, the very reason I started this blog--at one of the Market's many workshops. I hope that some of you will join me at the Market for a HealthRhythms Empowerment Drumming Circle. I'll tote the drums to Lexington, so you don't have to bring a thing, but your willingness to express yourself in a new way. I just did a demo for Macy's Art Sampler at Fairfield Community Arts Center, and that group had an excellent time. No prior skill is necessary. If you'd like to know more about HealthRhythms, check out the video at this site where the founders(who trained me), facilitators, and participants tell you their experiences:

http://www.remo.com/portal/hr/

You can view the various workshops available at the Market and sign up at this link:

http://artscouncil.ky.gov/KentuckyArt/2012Market.htm

We are so grateful that the Kentucky Arts Council has ramped up the marketing of the total Market experience. They have always been adept at spreading the word about the event itself which has often been rated #1 in annual craft show polls. But this year, they are giving extra attention to the stages and workshops, providing a smart phone app, Facebook page, and many other first-time promotions. So, not to sound like everybody else, but yeah, why not…we'd really be happy if you'd "like" the Kentucky Stage on Facebook as we are trying to reach 100 likes TODAY.

You'd be supporting some really fine musical acts. And making our day.

http://www.facebook.com/thekentuckystage