Deborah Thompson

Deborah Thompson coordinates country dance programs at Berea College, where she combines her love of old-time music and dance with her desire to pass it on to others. Since 1976, she has performed both solo and with various groups. She currently performs with the old-time and Americana band, Skipjack.

Deborah Thompson, Professor, Berea College; Hisel, Kentucky:

“I’ve lived there (Hisel, Kentucky) since 2001. Before that I was in Barbourville, Kentucky for about 10 years. I’m originally from Baltimore, Maryland area and moved a lot when I was a kid. Been in Kentucky since 1991. 
I was at Union College in Barbourville, teaching a program called the Appalachian Semester. We would get students from other colleges to come to our little college and kind of do a study abroad. We would travel around the region and use the community members as our teachers. The students would do internships and get sociology credit for that. I’m also a teacher at Berea College. 

I consider myself to be a resident, an ally, a student of Appalachia. I identify with being here, but I wouldn’t claim it as my own. I feel most comfortable here, but I grew up with parents who are from the Great Plains and I grew up all along the east coast. When I finally came to Appalachia as a college student myself, I felt most at home here than anywhere else I’d been. So, it’s complicated, but I hesitate to say I’m Appalachian because I didn’t grow up here, and I think that is an important thing. 

[Pronunciation of Appalachia] It is interesting how just that pronunciation can make a big difference. I lived in West Virginia for a while, and that’s definitely Appalachia. Except they say App-a-lay-sha. They have a little more northern culture, but still mountain. So, it’s what part of the region you’re from. I also realize that Appalachia is a huge area. Northern Appalachia, I’ve been in Pennsylvania and it looks just like Kentucky and the culture is very similar. And people there would say App-a-lay-sha. I’m trying not to be snobbish about that myself, but it is kind of an insider outsider kind of a marker.

Hillbilly is interesting. I think it’s something that people who live here can claim as a powerful symbol, a powerful identifier. A lot of people use it very sloppily, and it can be used very hurtfully. I try to avoid it unless I know who I’m talking to, and unless I make it clear what I’m meaning by it, or if I use air quotes. It’s a very loaded term that it’s not very comfortable for a lot of people, and so I try to be careful and not try to alienate people. Appalshop certainly talks about hillbilly nation, and in that context, it’s a very powerful term. I think it is something that people can use and I respect that, but I will be careful with it. 

My passion is the kinds of things we do here at the Hindman Family Folk Week, which is people participating in their own lives and building community through cooperative music and dance and participation. My passion is for people to not think they can’t do something because somebody told them. You know, somebody told them they can’t sing. Well I don’t believe that. So, helping people appreciate and learn about this kind of music and dance and feeling empowered to do that for themselves, that’s my passion really. 

[About Appalachian culture and traditions] I don’t think they would be kept alive if they didn’t have some meaning for people. When you talk about, “I’m going to do this to keep it alive,” it’s as if you’re resuscitating a corpse and what’s the point of that? It’s got to mean something for the people who do it, and just doing it for the sake of keeping it alive is not enough.
I think making it relevant, or for me those things are relevant and part of it maybe a little bit of paranoia on my part thinking this world could just disintegrate with all the crap that goes on and all the nuclear weapons and everything. And so what’s gonna happen if the grid goes out? It does periodically. I like to be as self-sufficient as I can be. Not to be apart from people, and to only do for myself, but I want to be able to keep myself. It’s making your own fun, and not having to rely on a television set or paying money for your entertainment. You can make your own entertainment and you forge relationships by doing that. The value of that is that someday we’re gonna have to do for ourselves again. I just can’t imagine that all of this digital technology is going to stay around forever. 

Place has a big part of who we are, it’s very important and you’re history affects who you are. People have specific histories, and so that’s why we need to know our own history. We can learn a lot from that. I don’t think we should blindly follow our traditions, but I think we should use them to build on, and acknowledge the value of the people who went before us who did all these things that a lot us can’t do now. There are power situations going on. It’s worth fighting for making sure that the people maybe who are less powerful still have their history told.

When I talk to people about it, I use a quilt analogy where you have a lot of the same pieces in a lot of different cultures. You have family, you might have education for children or work or gender roles, all these pieces and you might share some of the same pieces with another culture but it’s the way it’s put together that makes it unique. You might have a quilt that’s all made of triangles, but if you put it in a different way it looks different. It’s a particular combination of things. Around here, southerness but not too southern, mountain, rural, different ethnic groups that make this up. You have your Scotts-Irish, some German, African American and some places like coal camps you have some other ethnic groups like Hungarian or something. And then it’s influenced by the land that’s here. So, I guess it would be that particular history and that particular combination of things. 

I agree with some of what Loyal Jones says about personalism. It’s part of the southern thing; part of the rural thing. People really appreciate people as persons, and want to relate to them in that way. Religion is really important in Appalachia. Even if you are not part of an organized religious group, people have more of a knowledge about Christianity, Protestant Christianity, and maybe a little more autonomy with that. Language use and then some of the cultural things, the way people play music and the way they dance and the way they cook and the stories. Story telling is really important. That’s the way people tell their history and relate to each other. Like, who are your people? Oh, you’re part of those Thompsons? No, my Thompsons come from Canada. But still, I live at Hisel. I know these people and these are my neighbors. You find your place in the world. Place is super important here. 

A lot of the Appalachian people I know continue to have hurtful memories and stories about people talking about them being barefoot or you know, incest, or other kinds of really bad parts of the stereotype. I think that people will accept that or identify with that if they’ve been politicized maybe somehow. Here’s a story that maybe will help illustrate it. I was teaching a elder hostel, or Rhodes Scholar program in Berea. Somebody had gone to some local restaurant and they saw a t-shirt that said, “you know ten ways you can tell you’re from Kentucky,” and there was stuff about you brush your tooth and stuff like that. And the woman said what’s wrong with you people? Here you’re selling these t-shirts. No wonder people keep making fun of you. And I was saying, what’d you mean you? You know who are you talking about? Are you talking about the restaurant owners? Are you talking about me? Are you talking about the person that works in the gas station? 

You know there is no consensus about we are the Appalachian people and we’re going to stand together. That idea of having a solidified identity around some issue, or around skin color or around religion or whatever. People will come together when there is something really drastic like a sludge spill or something like that, but once that gets cleaned up, people go back to their life. They may not even realize it. But they’re comfortable. And so it’s uncomfortable to be always pushing back. 

One of the things that drew me to Appalachia actually in the 1970’s, ‘80’s, from outside was because I felt like the people who lived here were living their lives the way they felt like they should. And so, when strip mining protests were going on in the ‘70s and ‘80s that was the thing that really drew me here because I thought, you know they are standing up for what they believe in and not just caving in to middle class capitalist culture. 

And I still feel that way. That is one of the things that I like about living here is that people are more comfortable living the way that they think they ought to live, and speaking the way they want to; even if it’s not acceptable in middle class mainstream culture.“

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."