John Haywood

John Haywood, middle name's Wezley, but it’s spelled with a ‘z’, Artist, Painter, Musician and Business Owner (Tattoo Parlor):

"I live in Knott County, Kentucky, at the confluence of Big Doubles, Little Doubles and Buffalo Creek.

I spent about 10 years hanging around Louisville and Morehead, going to college. [Majored in] Art, graphic design as an undergrad, and painting as a graduate student. 

Mostly for a living I run a tattoo shop here in Whitesburg. I make a little money playing music every once in a while, and sell a painting every once in a while. Well, maybe [I’m a jack] of three trades! But, they're all kinda real similar. I’m really good at those things but I’m kinda horrible at everything else I guess. 

Where I grew up in the mountains, we grew up in the holler. We had a post office that was actually named after our family. Risner, Kentucky. The post office was discontinued in the early ‘80s. I was probably about seven or eight years old, I guess, when they quit using that post office. It was a little country store. Everybody in the whole holler I was related to somehow or another, you know what I mean? We had a family cemetery, a little church. My parents never had any trouble worrying about us, because your neighbor would be your aunt, and your cousins lived on up the holler, and you had the run of the whole holler pretty much growing up. It was a real blessed experience for me because I can’t find that anywhere else anymore. 

[Had a knack for art] Just from a very early age. In the holler there where we grew up, I had a lot of cousins, a lot of ‘em were guys and I was kinda like the youngest of a lot of cousins as far as the guys. I was one of the later guys, so all of my older cousins were real big into sports and real big into competing and all that sort of stuff so what they would do was, they’d get me out there and just run circles around me and stuff. And for me, the thing I could do that was good was this art. For as long as I can remember, I drew. My granny has pictures that I drew stuffed in an old Bible that I couldn’t remember ever drawing. But I drew ‘em. Little kid doodles. And so I just always did it. For me it was just kind of an escape from the pressures of all the real world, you know, from socializing’, because I did have a lot of older cousins that beat up on me all the time. 

So that was my thing. I was horrible and they didn’t want me on their team at ball time. I’m so tall everybody was wondering why I didn’t play basketball. See, my papaw played for Wayland, the Wayland Wasps, and they were always known for their basketball team and that’s how he got through high school, being a good ball player, you know.

[Got into playing music] Sometime around the 7th grade, when I was probably around 10 or 11 years old I started messing around with different things. My aunt lived in the old home place, my mom had three brothers and a sister and they all grew up in this old house that my aunt lived in when I was growing up. And in her house, she had these old instruments that were unplayable, but that were fascinating to me and I’d get ahold of one and just bang around on it. And then one day, my mom actually got this keyboard and we would just sit around and mess with that. 

I was into rock and roll, so I finally talked them into getting me an electric guitar by the time I was about 12 or something. One of the things about learning to play rock and roll was you have to learn a lot of basic stuff, so one of my cousins up the road, I could take my guitar to him and he would tune it, and he would tune it by playing ‘Cripple Creek’ or ‘Old Joe Clark’ and then he’d make me learn it, you know. So at the time, I would learn those old tunes but I didn’t think of it as being culturally significant. I didn't think of that sort of stuff. I was just like these are these old tunes that these people play and it’s what you gotta do before getting into the good stuff. That was always how I felt. 

I guess when the newness of the city started to sink more in and started to feel more comfortable I started to miss home more or less. So missing home, and having failed after failed attempt at having a rock and roll band… I still want to play music but I wanted to find something that was me, that was kind of where I came from so I started investigating more and more the traditional music of the mountains as a means of just strengthening what I already did. I didn’t know that I would eventually just stick to these traditional sorts of methods of playing. I thought that I would just be learning some techniques that I could apply to whatever else it was I was doing. 

But what I realized is that, when learning more about the banjo and stuff, I began to learn the history and where all the songs came from and even that the banjo is set up to play a certain way. I became more fascinated with that than trying to use it as a means to create some kind of real, I don’t know, original, commercial type music. I think a lot of it was I was in my 20s and homesick and I always thought, well if you’re not successful in the rock and roll business by the time you’re 25 you're probably not gonna be. 

I also had the art thing going at the same time. It always has worked kind of hand in hand, the art and the music, cause a lot of the art is about music. I owe a lot of what I paint these days to having gotten more into my culture and the history. It’s not just the music I’m into now, but it’s all the old ways of living and eating and all that stuff that interests me now. 

The first thing that comes to my mind is that this (Appalachian) culture is just about living. Everybody, when it comes down to it, just seems to be concerned about living. You could say we’re about so many different things, but I feel like we’ve never been about trying to make a big deal out of ourselves or anything like that. We’ve always just been about carrying on what we do. Even in people that haven’t really learned about their culture, a lot of people take it for granted, I feel like. 

But in the end it’s all still there, even, a little bit in everybody, no matter what kind of thing you're into, we’re still all this… there’s something the same in all of us. And I’ve learned a lot that through having the tattoo shop. Cause I tattoo coal miners and I tattoo artists and I tattoo an environmental activist type person and these are all people a lot of times you don’t get ‘em in the same room or it can be a mess, you know. But I see all these types of people on a regular basis, and so it’s given me this nice interpretation of everybody, everybody just wants to live here. They love it here. They don't want to leave. Some people will leave and find better things, but everybody generally, they may leave Eastern Kentucky, but most of the time they’ll find some place in the mountains to live. 

Most people don’t leave the mountains to come back and coal mine, really. They leave the mountains because they want something better. My grandfather was a coal miner, quit school in the 6th grade, worked underground, finally got black lung and died when he was 72. And the one thing he told me was to get an education; to go experience the world. He was like, ‘Don’t do what I did.’ That was his number one thing and I think about that every day I get up.

I think we’re the most intelligent people on the planet; only because we know about things that are of the earth. You can’t just walk down the street and grab whatever part you need for whatever just broke, you know what I mean? When I lived in Louisville, I lived on Frankfort Avenue, everything at your disposal, right there, anything you wanted. Here in the mountains, we’ve always had to make do just because of the bit of distance between many of us, and we’ve had to rely on each other, so a lot of us have strong family ties, which is really important to your health and everything. 

For instance, the stereotype of the banjo player, everybody thinks of the banjo player being kind of like an ignorant hillbilly, but all the banjo players I know are highly intelligent people. Even culturally exposed. Not so isolated like everybody thinks. [On whether Deliverance destroyed the perception of the banjo] I would say so. You still hear the jokes. 

I got into tattooing, I was about to graduate from college with an art degree, and nobody had any faith in me. I’d spent eight years in college to graduate with a Masters of Art. That seemed like a real kind of worthless degree to some family and kinfolk and stuff. 

When you run around with the rock and roll crowd, tattoos are the way to go sometimes. I really loved tattoos because it was art, something you can draw and stuff. So, I ended up meeting a guy. There was a co-op studio, we all worked at in Louisville and one of the artists that come in to get a space, his name was Adrian Wright, he was a real folk artist. He would do paintings there and I knew he tattooed. I helped him organize a tattoo art show one summer. Over the course of that I started meeting all these tattoo artists, and it was cool because they were really drawing every day. That was what their profession was, they drew every day and I was just so jealous because here I was just trying to get a job maybe teaching. I’ve done my fair share of teaching to compare. 

During the course of all that he said ‘have you ever thought about tattooing’ and I said ‘well I thought about it’ but I didn’t know if it was for me or not because I considered myself more of a fine artist, I guess. My oil painting style is kind of my take on the old Flemish style of oil painting, which is building layers and it’s sophisticated color and this sort of stuff, which really doesn’t apply to tattooing all the time. You gotta do it like once and get it done. But I thought about it and I talked to my wife, Kelly, about it, and they told me I’d make $600 a day. I was like, ‘I’m in!’

I soon found out you end up working for free for a year, scrubbing floors, but you learn about sterilization, you’re learning all this stuff. You’re working in a shop. I was actually an apprentice at one of the busiest shops on Fort Knox. So it was military guys all the time. Military families, rednecks, bikers, you know, everybody under the sun was through there at Fort Knox. It was like a crash course in learning about the tattoo world. I stayed there for about five or six years. 

Got burnt out and quit totally. Came back home and said ‘alright I’m coming home, I’m getting away from this crazy city life stuff.’ So when I came back home, I actually took a few little jobs here and there just doing music. I really got into my painting. Started doing more festivals. But tattooing is the kind of job where you start to miss it. Your customers are your boss, so you’re used to having someone new telling you what to do every day. So I kinda like that about it because the hardest thing about being an artist sometimes is that little bit of inspiration. I can work hard, I’m like a mule man, I’ll sit and paint all night or draw all night, but that spark of inspiration, what you’re gonna paint, what you're gonna draw, can sometimes be hard to come by. So tattooing is like it keeps me fresh drawing. May be what other people want, but I get to do what I want every once in a while.

I think the number one thing [to help the economy] is to try to find some way of being proud of where you’re from. I don’t understand. I don't even understand sometimes what’s going on in Whitesburg because sometimes it seems like it’s a big lot going on and sometimes it’s like a whole lotta nothing. I still pass people on the street every day who say this town’s going to be nothing before you know it. 

There’s a little fire here and I like it. And that’s why I’m still here. There’s still a little bit of a little core community around here that seems to be content with being here. That’s why, when I think about, if I were to sum us up, we’re just about living. Cause there’s so many people here that could go somewhere else, including myself, and make more money. You know, get more exposure to whatever, have more opportunities. But we choose to stay here. And in a way, some of us have done it collectively. Anytime I think about leaving I don’t think about myself. I think about all these other people it would affect".

Lee Sexton

From Wikipedia:
Lee Sexton (born 1928, in Letcher County, Kentucky) is an American Banjo player from Letcher County, Kentucky. He began playing the banjo at the age of eight and is proficient in the two-finger picking and "drop-thumb" (clawhammer) traditional styles of east Kentucky. He also sings. His Whoa Mule album includes recordings from a 1952 home recording with fiddler Fernando Lusk to recordings made in 2001. Four solo songs also appear on Smithsonian Folkways album Mountain Music of Kentucky.

In 1999 Kentucky governor Paul Patton presented Lee with the Governor's Award in the Arts.

Lee Sexton worked as a field hand to earn the $1 he needed to buy his first banjo when he was eight years old. He received lessons from his father and uncles, one of whom was Morgan Sexton, the revered banjo player with a liquid and serene two-finger picking style. Growing up, Lee worked in the mines during the week and played his banjo on weekends, usually for house parties or corn shuckings. When Lee was 23 years old his right hand was crushed in a mining accident, forcing him to start playing the banjo with a new style of drop thumbing that he developed himself.By the 1940s he had migrated his career to the radio. In 1988, he released his EP titled "Whoa Mule"; it was later turned into a CD in 2004.

Lee Sexton, Age 86, Banjo Player, Linefork, Kentucky:

“My uncle took me in, you know. And I was just fifteen year old. He let me drive ponies, and I, I worked for him a long time. Then I went to the big mines, whenever I got old enough to get a job.

I first started at Jewell Ridge Coal Company, up at Leatherwood. I worked there seven or eight year, I guess, and then I went to Blue Diamond. And I worked there for years, and they closed that down, and I went to Southeast Coal Company, and they closed it up. And this mine, Scotia, over on Cumberland River. 

I went over there, and I was a-working there, and boy, it was hot as a firecracker with that gas. I got to noticing them safety lamps turning blue. I told the boss, I said, ‘This thing’s full of gas.’ Well, that light would go amiss, couldn’t see it nowhere. And I quit, like today, and tomorrow it blowed up, killed twenty-six men, I think.

And I’ve done a little bit of everything, worked in the log woods and railroads, sawmills. Everything.

[About his start in music] I got to hearing Old Cousin Emmy in Knoxville, you know. Bill Monroe, and them, and of course, my dad played before he got his hand blowed off (In the mines), and Morgan (Sexton) (1991 NEA National Heritage Fellow), my uncle and all of ‘em played. I’d hear them, and I got interested. It just about aggravated me to death, you know, because I didn’t have a banjo. 

Morgan, worked in the logwoods, and he boarded with us. He had an old open-back banjo, a Stellen. He put that in a meal sack and got a piece of rawhide. He’d wet that rawhide, and tie that so tight to keep me from getting it. But I’d always manage to get it loose while he’s a-working. I’d play. He could tell in a minute. He’d come in, and he’d ask me that, but I’d deny it. 

Well, I got this old banjo for a dollar. And my brother went to these Three C’s, they call it. And he bought me an old Kay’s banjo, and I let him take it back to work with him, and he sold it for three dollars. This old guy had it, and I tried to buy it back off of him. It wasn’t no good, but I just wanted it ‘cause it was old, and he wouldn’t let me have it. 

He come down sick on his bed and he had his wife call me. I went to his home, and whenever I got ready to leave he made his wife go get that banjo, and give it back to me. I’ve got it now.

About this old time stuff, they call it claw hammer, and they call it frailing. But what I done with the claw hammer, I called it the drop thumb. I’d get the same stuff with that thumb, as these three finger men. I got this hand messed up in the coal mines. 

I drove a shuttle car, and I pulled up on this ramp, you know, for this car to dump coal. They’s a big, old block of coal laying right up on top of that, that shuttle car. And I went to push it off, and whenever I pushed it off, they was a block in front of that, and it caught the top of that and pushed that up right over my finger there. Broke it. And they’s a coon bit me right there, a raccoon, bit me right there, broke both them bones, stripped that fingernail out. He was eatin’ my sweet corn, and I set a live trap, and caught it, and was getting him out. And boy, did he get me! Right there. I had to take fourteen shots. 

I always manage to come up with something. Whenever I get a sore hand, I’ll start studying and a-working it.

I play with two fingers now, and get the same stuff with two fingers as these three fingered banjo players. The same stuff. And where I play these big places and things, with these fancy banjo players, they can’t figure it out. Now, J.D. Crowe, you know him? We done a show down at Lexington, at that horse park. I played with him, and he got right down on his knees and looked up to see. It’s pretty complicated, but after you get used to it, you don’t pay no attention to it.

Did you ever hear of Roscoe Halcomb? Now he was my cousin, Roscoe was. I walked all the way, back whenever I was about fourteen, fifteen year old, I guess, up Line Fork, up a holler, and cross a mountain, into Little Leatherwood, they called it, to hear Roscoe play the banjo. And I went up there, and he was gone. 

Well, my uncle, he had a big handlebar mustache. His wife had died. He was living in an old-time log house. He’d washed his long handles out, and had ‘em on the clothesline. Roscoe had bought a Billy goat. I walked up there, and that goat had one of the legs chewed out of it. 

I said, “Old man, you’d better get out here and get that goat.” I said, “It’s chewed your long handles up.” He kept a double-bitted ax setting on the porch, where he been a-getting wood. Sharp as a razor, and he retch up and he twisted and picked up that ax. He stuck it right on top that goat’s head. He killed it. 

Well, I stayed so late waiting on Roscoe to get back, that I couldn’t get home. ‘Fore I went to bed that night, Uncle Marion said, “You never did hear me play a banjo, did you Lee?” I said, “No, I never did.” He said, “Well, I’m gonna play you one on the banjo, Ross’s banjo. He picked that up, and he sung one I never will forget it. Said he met a possum in the road, and it was a sight to see, whirled its tail, whupped my dog, and then bristled up to me. (Laughs loudly.) I never did forget that. 

I got this Black Lung. I draw Black Lung and everything. And I own a little farm down there, nine acres, got about an acre of bottomland. I tend every bit of it, every year.

Well, most things that I do [are] about playing a banjo, I just work on my farm down there. I’ve got an acre, just me and my wife. I don’t need it, but I like to tend it. I been used to it all the time. 

I live on the old farm I was born and raised on. The old home place is sittin’ up there, just like my mother and dad died and left it. I keep the grass cut, check on it. Their furniture is sittin’ in there, just like they left it. And it sits right in the mouth of a big holler. 

I’ll get hot in the garden, want to cool off. I got a riding lawn mower, can’t hardly walk. I’ll get on and ride it down there, it’s just like an air conditioning, the air that coming out of it.

I like to rabbit hunt and fish. I can’t get out into the hills to rabbit hunt, and I can’t get over to the woods, but I went to Wolfe County, and bought me a little beagle just about that high. I’ve learned him to ride that lawn mower. I’ll pull down to the doghouse, and he’ll hop on that lawn mower, and I’ll unsnap him, and take him around the hill there, where I live. He’ll jump off, and it ain’t five minutes he’s got a rabbit a-going. I sit right there on that lawn mower and kill ‘em.

Oh, Lord, I’ve played all over the world. I went up to the state of Washington, and I played up there. And I’ve been all over Virginia, Washington, D.C., and the Carolinas. I’ve played everywhere. I had the opportunity to go overseas two or three times, but I wouldn’t go. 
They come from way over there, overseas there, and shot a movie of me, back in 2013. They called me the other day, and said it was going to be published in this month. It’s called ‘Dead End Road.” That’s my address, 215 Dead End Road. And that’s what they named it. 

About three weeks, boy they liked to worked me to death. I swear they did. It was ever day, buddy, all day long."

Billy Mulkey

Billy Mulkey, Ypsilanti, Michigan with roots in Hazard, Kentucky, Lott’s Creek:

"I’m originally from Ypsilanti, Michigan, but my mom’s family is from Hazard, Kentucky, Lott’s Creek. 

My grandfather built (the Goose House). The last time I was actually inside, I was probably about four and I was being pushed around in a grocery cart by my grandfather and he was tellin’ me these stories on how him and a couple of his brothers and a couple of cousins had started the construction of the store. And the rocks, from my understanding, were from all over the country.

It’s basically just an old family country store that was started. Hazard was just a basic coal mining little city. You know, so it was just a local grocery store and a lot of people that went in there, stuff was either traded, bartered or just kind of put on credit.

It’s almost, not quite, oval shaped, but it’s kind of got the shape of the goose’s body, obviously. The shingles are green; it’s got a big red glass eye and everything. It’s a pretty amazing place, or at least it used to be when I was a kid.

My grandfather and grandmother, they left Hazard and Lott’s Creek to go to up north to Michigan for some of the factory jobs. So when they left, the rest of my mom’s family started following.

We used to come back every summer, so I’d spend all my summers down here. I still have a lot of family who comes down here every year. I still have a lotta family that lives over in Lott’s Creek and Hazard.

It’s still my home (despite growing up elsewhere). Oh yeah, always will be.
I think it’s amazing (Appalachian culture), you know, people are down to earth, they don’t expect anything from you other than just a friendly ‘hi’ or handshake. It’s home, is what it is.

It’s really sad (the way the media portrays Appalachian culture). They don’t take the time to actually get to know the people they paint a really dirty picture of [in] the Deep South. And they actually go for the hardest of the hardships, instead of seeing the true face of the South, in my opinion.
[The music is] heartfelt, it’s home-grown, you don’t find that up north. I’m more stuck on the old school bluegrass. It’s really hard to explain, ‘cuz when you hear the banjo or the fiddle or whatever, it just tells you that you’re home. And you hear somebody’s voice and it soothes you, unlike any other kind of music there is.

[Appalachian culture is] a wonderful experience that would be really sad and heartbreaking if you never got the chance to experience it. There’s a ton of other cultures, but when it comes down to it, what you wanna feel in your heart and soul is the South. There’s nothing else like it. I’m part Cherokee too, so I’ve spent time on reservations and it’s almost the same kind of feel. 

There’s always a sense of community, a sense of home, a sense of family, good food, good music. It’s family."

Jim Bordwine

Jim Bordwine, Retired Pipefitter, Living History Reenactor; Poor Valley, Virginia:

"I’ve been doing livin’ history for twenty-eight years now. I started out doin’ confederate cavalry mounted; took the horse wherever I went. After several years of that, I decided I was too old to keep falling off the horse. So now I concentrate on teaching about salt; why salt was so important. Folks don’t seem to realize it ain’t been that long ago our parents and grandparents were still living without electricity in these mountains. So when they’d have meat that they had to keep, there weren’t refrigerators, they had to salt that meat down to keep it from spoiling. And that’s what salt’s importance all through history was, was to preserve meat.

We were blessed there at the town of Saltville (Virginia). There was a huge body of salt in the ground, and they’ve made salt there for thousands of years. The town’s history actually goes back to the Ice Age. Back in those days, there was salt water springs flowin’ out of the hills. There was a salt-water lake in the bottom of the valley and that was drawing the big animals like the mammoth and the mastodon in there to lick up that salt around the edge of the lake. Well, the hunters that followed those animals in there when found this place, they realized it was something special. They stayed there and became the tribes that we know today as the Cherokee and the Euchee, different tribes like that. They stayed there and they started making salt and trading to other tribes. 

When tribes would come in there to get the salt, they may be the worst enemies in the world, but once they entered that valley they had to be on their best behavior. Now once they got outside the valley, all bets were off, but once they were in Saltville valley itself, they had to behave themselves. They traveled (from Kentucky & beyond) that far, to get the salt. It was used for other things, too; tan hides to make leather, but it’s main thing was to preserve meat. 

Now those Indians lived there, they made salt for hundreds and hundreds of years and then in 1567, Spanish soldiers came in and wiped out the village. Then it wasn’t called Saltville, it was called Maniatique. Spanish soldiers had a camp down where Morganton, North Carolina is now. They were running around in the mountains being Spanish soldiers. Spanish soldiers in those days weren’t very nice. Well, the main chief up here at Maniatique heard about’em. He sent word to them he didn't’ like what he was hearing. He said, “Ya’ll get out of my mountains, you leave now, if you don’t leave right now I’m gonna come down there and kill you all and I’ll eat you and your dogs.” For an Indian to tell you he’s gonna kill ya’ and eat ya’, that’s a big insult.

The Spanish captain decided he couldn’t put up with that kind of insult, so he marched fifteen soldiers into the village, and according to the records, they killed over a thousand Indians and burnt fifty of their lodges. Now the reason we got the story, one of the main chief’s daughters was a young girl, probably wasn’t ten or twelve years old, she was captured in the raid and was taken back to the (Spanish) village; which was a place called Santa Elena, was where Parris Island, South Carolina is now. As she got older, she become what they called a Christianized savage. She joined a catholic church, took a Spanish name, and if I remember correctly, she ended up marrying one of the soldiers that captured her to start with; so then her name was Malena Menendez.

The reason we know this story, a professor, the guy that was the head chemist professor at Virginia Tech for about twenty years, a guy named Dr. Jim Glanville, he was researching the chemical entry there in Saltville. He actually got the records from Seville, Spain where they told this story ‘bout bein’ captured and the water coming out of the hills and everything so that’s how come we finally got the story. And it’s kinda shaken up Virginia history cause you know yourself we were always taught Pocahontas, John Smith, 1607. They told us Pocahontas was Virginia’s first princess, well guess what, we had one forty years earlier over in the other end of the state. So, that’s kinda cool I think. 

Now, the white settlers didn’t start moving in until 1750. By that time the lake had disappeared, they had no idea there was salt under the valley. General Campbell, of Kings Mountain fame, he was having salt shipped in here from Williamsburg, Virginia by wagon. So now you stop and think about that. Williamsburg from Saltville today is a good seven or eight hour trip on good highways with cars. Can you imagine doing it two hundred-fifty years ago with an old wagon and a couple of oxen with no highways or nothin’? So that’s just like I said, goes to show you how much importance they placed on the salt. 

One day, one of the early settlers was out roamin’ around the hills and he stumbled across one of the salt water springs still flowin’. Well, the old light went off. You know they got an idea and started makin’ salt for their own use. So it became a huge business. Now, from the late 1700’s on, in fact, William King, who founded Kingsport, Tennessee, was a salt maker. That’s why Kingsport is there. He was shipping salt down to his port on the river. They kept making’ salt there, it got to be a big business.

Think about something. In the 1860’s, your average working man, if he had a good year, he might make a hundred, or a hundred and twenty-five dollars for that year’s work. In 1864, that one-year alone, even though we fought two major battles, we sold a hundred million dollars worth of salt. That’s 1864 dollars! How many businesses’ today can say they’ve done a hundred million dollars worth of business last year?

A lot of family fortunes were made there. The Stewart family you hear so much about over cross the mountain from us, the Stewart Land and Cattle, Jeb Stewart, who was the cavalry commander, Army Northern Virginia, his brother William Alexander, was living there in Saltville. He owned part of the Saltworks, so he was making a lot of money. The Preston family, I think they ended up going to Columbia, South Carolina getting into politics and stuff.

Are you familiar with the Martha Washington Inn? That was originally a house for the Preston’s. They needed something’ to do with all that money they were making. They built that big house down there in Abingdon. That just gives you an idea how important salt was in those days. 

It was a huge business. In 1892, a British company bought up the salt works, they made salt for a few years. But then around 1900 their scientists discovered by adding electricity and a couple other ingredients to that salty water they’d make chemicals out of it. So we had a big chemical industry there for about seventy years. The Air Force had a plant there and they were making’ something called hydrazine. Hydrazine is rocket fuel. The first man on the moon was put there by fuel made right over here in ole’ Saltville, Virginia. So when I’m talking’ to school kids I say “How cool is it that Neil Armstrong filled up with gas here ‘fore he went on his trip?” 

Living back in these mountains, you know the old Scots-Irish that come in here and the German settlers that were very independent people, stand up for themselves, wouldn't take guff off anybody. They thought it was their right back there in the old days to make moonshine for themselves. And when the government bucked against it, we had the whiskey rebellion. They thought it was our God-given right to make it ‘cause it was all coming from the earth you know. So that’s why they’d fight over that. And you know, even today, people back in these mountains are still very independent. They don’t like the government telling us what we can and can’t do. I’m not saying we’re anti-government. All these people fought for years to keep the Union together and fought in all the wars America ever had. But don’t come over here and tell us we can’t grow what we want to on our land or we can’t do what we want to on our own land. We’re just still very independent and very bullheaded about authority I guess. We figure we know how to live on our own, we don’t ask for nothing, we don’t expect to be told how to live. 

Hillbillies were just people that lived back in these mountains. People make fun of our accents, the way we talk. But if you start thinking about it though, they have proven that, our accents, the words we use, date back to Elizabethan English. We’re talking like the settlers that come over here in the 1600’s back into these hills. It’s pure. It’s very pure. One thing that breaks my heart today in schools is they’re doin’ their best to teach our youngins’, “Don’t say taters. Don’t say winder. Don’t say what cha doin’ over there?” They want you to speak this proper English. And I tell folks, “I ain’t English, and I ain’t gonna speak proper English.” I’m a southern American, I’ve worked these mountains, this was the way we was taught to talk.

I think every school ought to be teaching a class on local history and about our culture and our heritage. This is something near and dear to my heart. We’re unique. There were good folks here before we come to this country, but these mountains, these people are unique. It’s something you ain’t gonna find nowhere else in the world".