Ron White (not that Ron White)

Ron White (not that Ron White), Runs concessions in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee. Lives in Tazewell, Virginia (originally from Grundy, Virginia):

“When I was a kid you worked, not like now a days. We just worked. You raised what you eat. That’s just the way it was. You didn’t miss school unless you had to. Daddy worked and that’s just the way it was. 

[My dad was a farmer] and a coal miner forty-three years. Never got hurt; he was blessed. There was five of us [kids]. I’m the only boy. [I never went in the mines] ‘cause what it done to him. He couldn’t breathe. 

(Why did you stay in the mountains all your life?) The view and the people. You can’t get no better. They’re just all friendly; they don’t look down at the ground when they walk by you, they speak. 

I left here one time, but I came right back. I went to Myrtle six months. That was enough; I didn’t like it, I didn’t like the people, I didn’t like the crowd. I’m a hillbilly. That means everything. I’m a full-blooded redneck hillbilly. [That’s just] the way we are. 

I travel a lot. I’ve done concessions twenty-six years. I used to drive a truck, and didn’t know from day to day if I was going to work tomorrow. I was hauling’ coal out of the coal mines. Every time you turn around, they were talking bout laying off, so I said I got to do something. I was thirty-three. 

I’ve got two boys, they live in Tazewell. One has his own business, he’s in construction. The other works at Jennmar, makes roof bolts [for mining roofs], and that ain’t going to last long. 

I don’t know what people are going to do [when the mines are gone]. There is a hundred and seventy-eight homes for sale in Tazewell right now. A hundred and seventy-eight, man if you can believe that. That’s a lot of homes in the city limits. Ain’t nobody got money and what money they have got, they’re keeping’ it. 

[Outsiders] I don’t let them make fun of me. I tell them, ‘Don’t down me till you go try it.’ Go live our life. You’d be much happier than you are now. We’re always happy. We’re just happy, I don’t know why. Just cause of who we are, I guess. The way we was raised. 

[I ride] a motorcycle, a Heritage Soft Tail. I went to Sturgis once. That was a hoot. You need to go. It’s just a good time. Just take it at that; it’s a good time.”

Pam Robinson

Pam Robinson, Teacher at Wise County Christian School; St. Paul, Virginia:

"I am from the flatlands of Alabama. We came up here when I was thirteen years old for my mom to work for a coal company over in Wise County. [I’d] never been exposed to the mountains in my life ‘til we moved here. 

I remember just being in awe, just seeing the mountains. I had never seen mountains like that; even though I had lived all over the south and even lived overseas. [I lived in] Saudi Arabia. My mother’s second husband was a chemical engineer for an oil company. We moved over there with him, and lived for a short period of time and when they divorced, we moved back. We got here because she came back and needed a job. [I’ve lived in the mountains] thirty-eight years. 

I remember when I moved here, I’d hear people talk about soup beans. And I thought, well I’ve never heard of a soup bean in my life. Well, as soon as I went to somebody’s house and had some, I’ve been eating them all my life, but down south we called them pintos. That’s just all we called them, but they called them soup beans. 

It seems like every area has a little way that they do things just a little different, you know. I love cooking. I love to cook for my family and I can, I canned some beets earlier in the week. 

I went to school at Appalachia, Virginia, Appalachia High School. I played basketball and was a cheerleader and walked home most of the time back then. Of course, it was a lot safer for kids back then. I liked it. We got out when it snowed, stayed out until two or three o’clock in morning if they were cancelling school the next day. 

[My mother] was a draftsman for Westmoreland Coal Company, a draftsperson. Actually that’s how I started out. I was going to finish and go into engineering and started with that, and worked with that for many years and just decided that I wanted something more fulfilling, and I felt like the Lord was calling me to work with kids, so I kinda switched/changed tracks. 

Back in the late ‘70s, there weren’t a lot of women at all [draftspersons]. It took us a little while to adjust, because she was divorced and then a woman leading a home and then plus in kind of of a man’s job. It was a period of adjustment when we first moved up here. But, it all worked out and worked out very well. She worked there until Westmoreland shut down. It was a good thing --- it took care of us. She was able to raise us up on her own. My dad was not in the picture, financially or otherwise. So it was good.

My mother‘s a gifted artist, and went to a lot of the craft shows all around. I did that all my life with her. [We] traveled somewhere doing shows, Railroad Days at Appalachia and different things like that. We had a good life. I enjoyed it there. 

My mom does a lot of pen and ink portraits. She works in a lot of different mediums. She does oil. She doesn’t do as well as she used to…she’s getting older and having health problems and can’t do quite as much. The old Appalachian School that burned, she did a pen and ink of that and they made note cards and all that and sold them through the town and several of the historical places there and landmarks and things she did in pen and ink. 

[My mother] moved to Ohio two years ago. She said ‘Pam, you’ve took care of me for forty-nine years. I’m gonna go live near your sister and let her take care of me the rest.’ She moved up to Columbus, Ohio two years ago. It’s been culture shock for her up there.

To me living in so many different places, when I came here, there is a difference in the people. The morals tend to be a little stronger than other places that I lived. I don’t care for the negative connotation of ‘hillbillies.’ I think people here, their culture, their music, their arts things that I enjoy about the mountains, I think’s what people need to see and not the negative. To me that’s what makes a hillbilly, I would call it more a “mountain billy” or something. But I consider myself one; I’ve lived here longer than I ever lived anywhere in my life. It’s more home.

I am a born again Christian and I teach in a Christian school. To me, that’s important. As a whole, I don’t think we look at things like the rest of the world does. Our family, what your family means to you, your faith, those things are here, and that’s a good quality. People stick together, and you don’t see that all over the United States or in the South. That stick togetherness, help each other, you know, building your life on something that means something, your faith and raising your kids that way. That’s what’s important, I think.

There is so much culture here. Culture is its own type of intelligence, if you understand what I mean. You can read books and study all day, but if what you learn doesn’t mean something and translate in your life, it’s worthless. I‘m all about education. 

(Media portrayal) I don’t like us portrayed that way. These redneck country boys, jacked up trucks and drinking and all we do is feud and things, I don’t like that because I don’t think that is true. I don’t think that exemplifies the majority of the people here.

I like all the different flavors of speech. I love the way different people talk. So many different influences, it’s not ‘hicky,’ as I hear people say. There’s lots of lovely dialects here. I love to hear the way different people talk. That was one thing that fascinated me when I came here. Because they’ve asked me to talk, where I was from Alabama and I have kinda adapted to more like, I think, the people here. I think that’s very unique. 

The family bonds, that’s part of the culture, the music and the dance, it’s different. You can’t go to New York City and get what you get over at the Carter Fold. I don’t care what you paid for it. You just don’t get the same experience.

I like to scrapbook. I like to do anything with my kids. I love my kids. Very devoted to the Lord, my church, my ministry at school. It’s not a job, it’s a ministry and I like to tell people about the Lord, especially children. I am turned towards them. I like to go fishing, anything outdoors.

I’ve got three [children]. I have got one that is thirty-one. She is a registered nurse, and she is finishing up her Bachelor’s right now. She had to leave and go to school as soon as she saw her boy showed today {at the Rich Valley Fair], she left to go to college at Bristol and she’ll graduate in December. I have got a son that is thirteen, and I’ve got a daughter that is twelve. Then my thirty one year old has two little boys, so I’ve two grandsons, one that’s seven and one that’s three. They are all very unique, but they were all born here so they are authentic hillbillies. I am adopted, but they are authentic hillbillies.

(Raising cows for show) Our heifers look a little different than some of the other’s because our heifers go back into the field to breed, and we don’t want ‘em too fat so we keep ‘em on grass, mostly during the summer. We don’t throw a lot of show feed to them. They [the children] have just gotten interested. My son is very interested in everything agriculture related, so they decided to get into [it] this this year. 

He was the first one that had shown an animal at the Bristol Steer and Heifer Show in about thirty something years in Wise County, so he made the paper there and they were thrilled just to get it jump started again with the kids. We have a very small farm, just about twenty acres, and he is raising him three little steers. He‘s doing it all himself. He sells them, and turns the money over and buys more. 

His heifer actually came from my son-in-law and his dad. They told him to pick out whatever you want, you raise her and show her and enjoy her, and we’ll turn her back in the field. We have a garden and my daughter has two old horses she fools with. We don’t show those big time or anything, but they like to ride them and enjoy them.

They are little, rotten, dirty farm kids I call them. They like to get out and get into something all the time. It’s a pretty good life I think…pretty good.

[Coming home from Ohio] I feel comforted. I can go back to Alabama and visit my family there and not having the mountains, I am okay with that because it has a certain familiarity. But now, when I go to Ohio I feel very out of place, nervous and it’s like when we come back out of southern Ohio and back into Kentucky those mountains just start growing and I think about things and I think comforting would be a good word. It makes me feel good to be home. 

Some of the things we saw the last time we went were a little disturbing because a lot of the coal yards that were up there are just leveled. And it breaks my heart because we know a lot of people that don’t have jobs because that’s going downhill. But it’s comforting to me. I mean I consider this home. It took me a few years, because Alabama was always home. But now I realize this, I’ve been here so long and there is something here that I don’t have down there, I guess. This is home for me, you know."

Buck Martin

Buck Martin, Flea Market Vendor; Deane, Kentucky, Letcher County:

“[I grew up] at Halo, Kentucky. We had four miles of dirt road. Lots of times you couldn’t get home and had to walk and park your car. Especially, if it flooded. It’s country, you know. Most people kindly relied on garden stuff to live and so on. Some of us didn’t have no power. Some did. Some had television. Some didn’t. It’d just depend on what kind of family you came out of. 

Wheelwright School is where I went to High School, but I didn’t graduate. The little first school was Jack’s Creek School. I’d say about four rooms. It still exists over there. It’s made out of stone.

I went looking for work up in Ohio. Went to Columbus and found me a little job there and worked two or three years and it wasn’t paying nothing, 95-cents an hour, so I worked a while and I quit and come back. Then I drove a truck for I’d say about five years, hauled coal. Then I quit that and went back to Michigan.

I worked there about eight years for Ford Motor and then Washington Asphalt in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Worked seven and a half years for them. My mother had a store at Halo and she was getting old and she wanted her baby boy back, so I bought her store and come back. I run the store and sold tires, and my wife, she helped with it. Had a little gas station. 

Martin’s grocery was the name of it. We had two pumps there, maybe three. We had diesel, gas, high test and low. It was close to the post office there. Really what it was, it was a small area and population was low, you know, and it was the post office. I was close to the post office, so they’d wait in the store till the man come with the mail. 

Then, I went back in the coal business. I had two or three little small truck mines and didn’t make no money, but I got experience. From that, we got a trucking business. [We] built up about five tractor and trailers, and then we’d haul coal out of Perry County and then some into Virginia here. It was mine and hers [my wife] together, but I just fixed her a corporation and I worked for her. Let her be the real boss for a while. 

I got hurt off of the trucks, and since then I’ve just been flea marketing. I wrecked a truck over in Pike County, down Cowell Creek Mountain. 

My Martin side grandparents, they came from close to Ashland. Eventually, they moved from there to Whalen, Kentucky and what they call Pumpkin Center. My Mom’s side, she was a Hall. She come out of the Hawk Hall family around Knott County. Hawk had nineteen kids and he was an Old Regular preacher. He had two wives. One of ‘em died and he got a new wife. That’s where he got all them kids from. So my last aunt, I’d say about two years passed away. All of ‘ems gone. 

(About Old Regular Baptist Church) Well, now my Mom, she belonged to ‘em. And I joined one up in Michigan. It was a Southern Baptist. So I joined up there and I probably wasn’t about 25 or something like that, so I grew up in that type of church. My Mom wasn’t strict like the others. She’d go to my church or I’d go to hers. We didn’t fight ‘tween that. Long as you know Jesus. 
I like the scenery. The mountains. Sometimes they give you problems when it snows. When you need to go shop like [in a town], you can run to Wal-Mart real fast. Well, when I get ready to go to Wal-Mart it’s 30 minutes any way I go to town. You spend more gas and time. If you live in town like Columbus, or I lived close to Detroit, there’s stores everywhere you look. 

I really was raised here, and want to die here. I’m just partial to the mountains. 

You live harder here. You gotta work. When I was small, me and my mother worked in a cornfield [for] 50-cents a day. The wages ain’t so good. Now, if you [were] lucky here to work for a [coal] company, the little town would have their own company store. Them people lived pretty good. But, if you grew up and your Dad was hurt or you had people that got killed in ‘em [mines] you didn’t wanna work in ‘em no more. So, I was one of them that took off. My Dad got busted up. It didn’t kill him but he was crippled up. He run a motor, they called it a tram, and he hit another tram and it busted him up. My relatives, a lot of ‘em got hurt. Mining, you know, it’s dangerous in there and everybody don’t know if they’re gonna return or not. 

They’s lots of people that like to come down here. It’d be good if they could just get the money to fix the area, ‘cause they take these mountains and make back trails out of ‘em, horse trails, and 4-wheeler trails and they’d come from everywhere. And whenever they come like that, they need a motel and they gotta eat, so you get a lot of business. But, fiscal court has to vote whether they gonna spend on a job or not. Depends on who is the judge and all that is. That’s like the whole country. Depends on who’s in power. 

Me and my neighbor night watch for one another. He changed around and got on day shift and didn’t tell me. I dialed his phone, and [it wasn’t the] the right number. Anyway, I was watchin’ for him so I heard the 4-wheeler stop and I looked out the window, and there was a flashlight going over all his stuff. So I tried again [to call] and couldn’t get him. I made a little racket, noise trying to scare ‘em. I said well I don’t know what it is or who it is so I’m gonna call 911 and let them take care of it. Turned out, he [the neighbor] was at home and it was him out there with that flashlight and the cops come to him and pulled him out of bed. He was barefooted. They said, ‘well he must be the one that lives here. He ain’t got no shoes on [and] a burglar would have his shoes.’ I called the law on him! But I didn’t know. I was protecting him. 

I like coin collecting awful well. I did have a big one [collection] and I’m getting older and really don’t want things like that laying around. People would be more tempted to rob you and kill you. I got robbed two or three years ago, about four thousand dollars. They were so good at it, they broke the window out, double paned, they broke one pane and didn’t break the other. They had a little girl about this big with ‘em and they shoved her through that kitchen window and she opened the big door for the big boys. I was out like this and so they knew that. They know I’m gone now, but I hope they don’t try that again. I have security that watches ‘em and I know who done the other one. That’s another reason I quit coining. 

Right now, I got a bunch of cars. I’m an antique car dealer. I like old cars. My wife died three or four years ago and I had a little money and I had a few little friends that liked money and I got beat out of a little more money. I said well I’m gonna put it all in old cars, and if the girls get the cars, I’ve had it.”

Michel McKinney

Michel McKinney, Graphic Designer, Artist, Costume Designer; Bristol, Tennessee:

“I was born right outside Philadelphia [Pennsylvania, and we moved here when I was eight. We’re known as the ‘Damn Yankees,’ because we came down to visit and stayed. We had some family that moved down here, and we came to visit. My parents just really loved the area, and thought it would be a great place to raise me. We just kind of packed up with nothing, and moved down here. 

We go up [to Pennsylvania] and visit every once in awhile, and I can usually last just a couple of days before I miss it here. Everyone here is a lot more laid back. Everyone’s friendly. Whenever you go somewhere they don’t just say, ‘Hi,’ or ignore you like they do up north. They talk to you, even if it’s just about the weather. 

I don’t think I’m a hillbilly. I’m a little bit of city, and a little bit of country. When I was really little, we would have to drive two or three hours just to see a cow. And for someone like me, being able to move somewhere, where my backyard was the woods was right up my alley. 

I spent every single day in those woods when I was little. When I was really little, I had an overactive imagination, so I used to pretend I had my own nature show, and would go around, and would tell everybody about everything I had found, and all the different animals. I would have my dog with me, and he was my audience.

I love fishing. It’s one of my favorite hobbies. When me and dad first moved here, we went fishing all the time, and he took me out to the Weir Dam at South Holston before they had actually finished it and paved it. We had to make our way through the woods, and we’d been fishing all day and hadn’t really caught much of anything. Then, we heard the sirens, and thought, ‘Well, what’s that?’ And then they started generating, and the water came up so fast [and] instantly we both had fish. So here we are, trying to go backwards up a bank to get out of the water, while we were trying to catch fish. We both ended up falling in the water, with the fish still on our lines, but we did finally catch something that day. We just went home very, very wet. 

We work with the TVA here, and we get a lot of our electricity from the water. So when they generate the lake, they’re using that for electricity. And when they generate, the water levels rise, and it’s basically almost like a rip tide in the river. It’s crazy, but the fish certainly do bite much better then. It’s right from the big dam, which is right off South Holston Lake. 

I was introduced to jug fishing, which is something I think is very Appalachian. You get a big jug, we used one-liter bottles. You tie a rope around the top. Put about twenty feet of line, then you tie a fishing line on it, about three feet of that, and then a hook. You just let it float with your bait. For three weeks, we were apparently after Jaws, and we couldn’t catch her. She would bend the hooks straight, snap the lines ever time. Kept going to the store, and getting bigger lines, hooks, trying even harder and harder, different things for bait, and we finally caught a thirty-five pound catfish. On a jug! 

I go foraging as much as I possibly can. This year has been a little hard, as much rain as we’ve had. I didn’t know a whole lot about it until about eight years ago. A family friend talked to me about morel mushrooms, and I thought, ‘Well, I can do that. I can find those.’ I went out immediately and said, ‘I have to do this all the time.’ 

In the springtime, it’s morels, and ramps are one of my absolute, most favorite things. They do stink up the house. It’s kind of like a really, really, spicy onion raw, but, when you cook them, it’s almost like an onion and garlic mixed, and had a baby. They’re the greatest things you will ever add to any food. You can eat them raw [but] I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you had a whole pack of gum. If you sweat, the smell of them will come out of your skin. People don’t realize they have been over harvested. They take several years to cultivate, so you go and wipe out a population, it won’t come back. 

Any kind of flowers you can get in the springtime, you can make jellies out of. I actually didn’t know you could do this, but you can use dandelions, violets, most of what everyone considers weeds in their yard. 

This time of year, summer, I’ve got black trumpets and chanterelles. And a little bit before now, you get milkweed, and they kind of taste like broccoli. In the wintertime, you can get oyster mushrooms, and several other different kinds. There’s always something.

Black trumpets are my favorite. You can put them in pretty much anything you put a normal mushroom in. Same with the chanterelles. They have more of a woodsy taste, so I prefer to eat them just by themselves. 

I’ve got [a blog] ‘Foraging Appalachia,’ and I want everybody to do it safely, because there’s a lot of people that just go out there, and pick whatever and get themselves in trouble. I try to post a lot of safety tips, [and] how to identify things. I also post a lot of recipes for people. (foragingappalachia.com) 

You always need to be responsible foraging. You can take away too much. You don’t want to rip everything up from the ground, because that destroys the root base. 

I am a thirty-four year old person, who wears costumes. Actually, it’s one of the art forms that’s super, super challenging, and I think that’s my favorite part about it.. You take something from pop culture, that’s never actually been created. You figure out how to create it, using stuff you find at Lowe’s, fabric stores, craft stores, and everything else. 

They usually have a competition, which with my competitive spirit, I usually like to enter them. I’ve won a Best in Show, and Best Female, and I think there’s another one. I can’t remember. 

I love the mix of culture you get here. I’ve lived other places, and I just keep coming back here. My heart’s here.

When I’m in the mountains, if I’m real anxious, or having a bad day, it teaches you to step back, calm down, enjoy the peace. Just kind of be in that moment, and not freak out about everything.

Losing my granddad was really tough for me. I’m divorced, and that was really hard for me as well. But even in my lowest moments, it seems like there was always someone there to help me out. When my grandfather died,I went to the woods the next day. It really calms me down, and this area itself helps with that kind of stuff. 

I try to make little differences, because I think even a smile or a kind gesture can mean a lot to someone else. Each day, if you could make a kid really happy, or if you can give a meal to a homeless person, just make those little moments count. I think that makes a difference in this world.”