Bobby Ramey

Bobby Ramey, HVAC Technician, ; Wildcat Ridge, Clintwood, Virginia:

“I have lived here in the mountains all my life. I was raised on Rose Ridge, a neat little place. It was peaceful. I stayed in the woods and beat on the trees with sticks pretty much. Of course, I went to school and all that good stuff. 

I was always interested in nature though. It’s where I spent ninety percent of my time; either hunting or something like that. I love turkey hunting. Spring turkey season is one thing I really enjoy. She [wife, Elizabeth Ramey] gives me an out of jail free card to go turkey hunting.

I play a guitar, which that is a common thing for our area. If you don’t at least have a guitar, or have picked one up at some point in time, you really ain’t from around here. [My music] is just soft stuff that I’ve come up with, country and southern rock, stuff like that. I just picked up the guitar and started playing one day. I was sixteen. 

My boss, he plays and we get together ever now and then and just pick around and play a little bit. It’s usually a Friday evening thing. I love it, its [playing music] peaceful. You don’t have to worry about what you’ve [got] to do tomorrow, or what you done yesterday. It’s there in that one moment playing. 

I don’t get to play as much as what I used to whenever I was younger. I’ve got a large family to take care of. My wife, she is stay at home, so I try to do everything I can. I don’t have too much free time. 

I went to Ervington High School, a very small school. It’s shut down now. It was an amazing school though. If you needed help, you got help. There might have been only twenty-two people in your graduating class, but it was good.

I worked from ninth grade on. I worked for Big Al at 83 Gas and Grocery, so I pumped gas after school and on the weekends until about eleventh grade or so, and then I started working for an auditing company. I worked there on the weekends.

I was working on heavy equipment and I wasn’t getting paid for my overtime. I had known Eric [his boss] for several years. We’re neighbors, pretty much. I was talking to him one day and he said, ‘I’ll show you, come with me.’ I have been working for him for about four years now. I have on the job training. You can read about something all day long, but hands-on is a whole different story. You see it firsthand. I love the electrical side of it. I have been shocked several times so… I enjoy it though. You meet a lot of good people. You’re not doing a lot of the same stuff every day.

My sister, she was born in Colorado, so my mom was over there for a little while. My step-dad, he’s from Michigan. I really didn’t know my own dad very well. They divorced when I was really young. My step-dad raised me. His name is Doug Rose. He drives an oil truck for 83 Gas and Grocery, and that’s how I got my first job.

Alka Mae Bosquette was my grandmother on my mom’s side, or Mae Rose, whichever you prefer. She was a tough little lady. I remember she used to go bar hopping, she did, and she was like seventy something. But she always would carry this little knife with her and she was getting ready to go bar hopping one night and she had that knife down the side of the couch. Somehow, it had opened and she sat right down on it. My brother reached up and pulled it out of her back. 

She had every bone in her body broken at one point and time [from a] bad relationship that was the French side. That’s where you get Bosquette. That was way before I came into the world. She was a wonderful lady though. She passed away of aspiration on the way to the hospital. 

The papaw that I called papaw was actually my step-dad’s dad. Enos Rose. He was a tough booger. Always went shirtless everywhere he went. That was my go-to person. You know you have someone when you are little that always does something with you? He always helped me out. I helped him in the garden and I would go to the store with him everywhere. I got his 12 gauge, which I‘ve got it at mom’s put up. It means a lot to me. I never did get to go hunting and fishing with him. He retired from the Ford Motor Company. He was from Detroit also. Which there was a lot of people that come from Detroit. They had roots here.

I had a very good childhood. I didn’t have to worry about people bringing guns to school and stuff like that. [They taught me to] respect your elders and work hard. That’s why I got a job young. My step-dad told me, ‘if you ever want anything you’d better go get it.’ So I jumped right on that ball. 

[I see myself] living here the rest of my life. I lived in Greensboro and Durham and Raleigh in North Carolina. That wasn’t my home. I was nineteen and twenty. Whenever I worked for the auditing company that’s where they had me at. I was in and out of there for about six years. I got to see the city life and I don’t fit in there. I’m just a country boy. I got to come home for one week out of the month and then I’d go back down. 

But getting down there and out of the mountains, it’s not right. It’s not natural for me. [When I would come home] and I would see the mountains, it gives you a fluttery feeling. There’s nothing like coming home. 

A lot of people, they’ll leave out of here and ninety percent of them always come back. There’s just nothing like this, you don’t have to worry about the hustle and bustle or what the person behind you is going to do to you if you say ‘hi’ or something like that.

(What is Appalachian culture?) The way we think. The way we act. To me, we are more outspoken than others. We’ll speak our mind. We’ll tell people you know, well hey, I think that’s right or I think that’s wrong. Other people around our area will respect that. 

[Coal] is where a lot of people around here got their money. I’m worried that this is going to just be a little ghost town now and plus, they’re coming in with a new highway and it’s going to by-pass Clintwood. If you ain’t got nothing here, the closest Walmart is what, twenty-five miles away? It just makes me worry about our area, I guess.

You have your local shops, they don’t want nothing big to come in, like Walmart or Lowe’s or anything like that. So it’s kinda like a win/lose situation. If you bring somebody in, you’re going to lose all your local businesses. Those are businesses that have been around for years, ever since I was little. If you don’t, what’s going to happen? So what do you do? 

Tourism is a possibility because we are in the mountains, and some people do like to get out and hike. They are working on some trails and stuff around here, which is a good thing. Horseback riding, that’s a big thing around here. Getting people to travel here is the thing, though. If there is nothing here, why would you want to put forth all of the effort to get here to see nothing? You have to drive two hours away to get to do something.

[Media portrayal] They‘ve the wrong point of view, which everybody has one. To me, they think that we are just a bunch of coal miners. It’s hard to put into words. I wish they could live here for a day and walk [in] some of our shoes and see what it’s like. What would I tell them if I could? We are hard workers that’s for sure. We are very proud Southerners. We love our heritage. Coal keeps the lights on, you know.

I’m a hillbilly. To me, it means that I’m a hard worker, I enjoy life. I don’t care about what other people think about me, that’s for sure. We grow our own food. Papaw’s got a big garden back here. I hunt. I fish. Don’t ride planes. I talk to everybody I see. I wave at my neighbors and help them any way I can. To me that’s a hillbilly. 

And of course my accent. That’s a bonus I guess.”

Ray “Pee Wee” Osborne

Ray “Pee Wee” Osborne, Retired; Saltville, Virginia: 

“I was a financial officer at Roanoke Business College, that’s where I graduated from. I was a maintenance planner at Olin Mathieson, and also a financial planner at the Mount Rogers Planning Commission. 

[Growing up] we did just what a bunch of old boys do when they get out. We’d go swimming, shoot marbles, pitch horseshoes, hunt and things like that. [We’d] play a little golf and caddy on the golf course. I guess [my favorite thing to do was] marbles. We used to get on our knees, you know, and wear the kneecaps out. 

You got a knife that’s got three blades in it. You opened the long one, and then you got the other two and you stick it in the ground and flip it up in the air and how ever it comes down, how it lands [is how you score]. 

Sometimes it lands on a blade and on its back, you never know. If you beat somebody, you might be playing for marbles. I’ll put three up and they’d put up three marbles. Marbles was a handy thing then. 

My school years were [the] Saltville Shakers in Saltville, Virginia. We played football, baseball, and basketball. And there for many years, the athletes there were something else. But it’s not like it was then. I guess they probably ruled the valley here then, but Rich Valley had a real good athletic program. 

I’ve fished this river all the way to the Holston River. We used to hunt in the mountains at a place called Sugar Grove. And we’d go up into Bath County too. You catch Bass, Suckers, Red eyes, Perch. 

My mother died when I was one. My Dad died when I was fifteen. When my Dad died, I went and stayed with my sisters until I was 17 [when] I went in the service. 

[I served in] the Army in ’44, ’45, and ’46. I was in the United States, and I was out in the Pacific and I spent quite a bit of time in Honolulu. I was a range setter. You got these 40mm cannons, you got a box out here and you look in a lateral and a vertical on your scope. I don’t remember whether I was lateral or vertical. That puts your gun out there in action. 

We had to do a lot of guarding there. This army we had, they took care of the job. They set down the country, and luckily I didn’t have to go to Germany. They were doing a good job over there. They did a good job in Japan, so I was one of the lucky guys. 

I came back from the service and stayed there and worked [here] for one month, then I left and went to Roanoke. Went to school up there. When I got out of school, I came back and bought me a place there in Saltville [and] got married. 

[We] got two daughters, Vicky and Melissa. Vick is a teacher [and] Melissa is a pharmacist. When she got out of school, she went and worked in a pharmacy down in Knoxville [Tennessee] for four or five years. Somehow or another, a federal agent talked her into going into the FBI, and she did. They sent her out to Kansas City and [she] stayed there fifteen years. Well, [she quit] because she didn’t want to go over in a foreign country and work in a hospital, so she decided she’d get back into pharmacy. 

All of my relatives in Tennessee, most of them are gone. There’s a few left there, but just like one of them. Marvin Brown, he was a magician when it comes to making things; organs, pianos, guitars, fiddles, anything like that. It fell to his son, a guy by the name of Buster Brown. They do the same thing [still] in Mountain City, Tennessee. 

[I’m a hillbilly]. I guess it’s just all of us is hillbillies around here. Yeah, we’re all hillbillies doggone it! The people you growed up with, we all stayed here. Lot of ‘em gone now, but still a good place to live. I didn’t grow up in the city, that’s for sure. [City people] don’t have time to talk to you. [They’re] on the move all the time. 

This [Rich Valley Fair] is for the people. This bottom down here is plumb full of campers and things, and people are vacationing down there. These people come in here, and I talk to ‘em. Got a lot of friends now from this. 
Why leave a place like this? Look around you!”

Billie Mullins

Billie Mullins, Clintwood, Virginia:

“I have lived here all my life. We didn’t have a lot, but we was happy. We had time for each other. All together a different world than what it is now. My mom’s people lived all around in this community, and we visited a lot and we had a lot of cousins to play with. We did have bicycles to ride, but other things was very hard to get because you know how it was. We’d play tag, ride our bicycles, built play houses and worked puzzles.

My dad was a game warden. He was a coal miner and he did the game warden work on the weekends. When he retired from the mines, he took up full-time being a game warden. They gave him a special badge when he retired, saying that he could use that badge if he needed to the rest of his life. I was very proud of him he was a very good dad. My mother, she was a good mother, too. We had a good home.

Before I was born, they had an explosion down at Splashdam. He [my dad] was to go in [to work], but something happened that he didn’t go that day. That’s when the mines blowed up. 

Then, he come up here and he got a job and he walked to work over the hill here and down to the mines. [Me and] my younger sister, she was my niece, but mother raised her, we would come right out here and we would wait for him to come up the hill. 

[He would be dirty] he had to come in and we had no bathroom and he had to wash in a galvanized washtub. He would have coal dust all over him from head to toe. He always changed his clothes and took his bath right at the first start. He didn’t have any trouble getting clean. 

He never got hurt in the mines, thank God for that, but he wound up with black lung, and that’s getting hurt.

I have worked in the nursing home, and I took cosmetology and I had a beauty shop for a while. I still like to work on hair, but with my condition with my back, I can’t do that anymore. But that was what I liked to do. 

I married and had two children [a son and a daughter]. My husband was a coal miner, and he’s retired now. We try to raise us a garden and things like that. 

My daughter was here earlier. They have been living in Texas. She worked down there and now she is changing jobs. They will be moving to South Carolina here in a few days. I’ve had a time with them [my grandchildren]. They have all been good and they’ve all been sweet and I love them with all my heart.

(What makes Appalachians Special?) The love we have in our heart for each other and for our animals. We love our animals. You find a person that loves animals, you can tell what kind of person they are by that. 

We lost our dog in the winter. We’d had him for about fifteen years, and he was like one of the family. He got cancer, so we did everything we could, but then the last time we took him to the vet and he had tests run, they said it was aggressive. When the big snow come, we had an appointment to take him to be put to sleep. 

The big snow come, and we couldn’t get out, so we kindly thank God for getting to keep him that extra two weeks before we took him. I don’t have any other animals right now. I have all of their [her children’s] pets to take care of. My daughter has two dogs until she comes back to get ‘em. 

My happiest time was when I was baptized, that was in 1987. And I have done my very best to live right according to what God wants us to do. I remember it was a snow on, and my brother-in-law and I were baptized at the same time. I did not get cold. I know I had a coat to put on when I got out of the water but there was a snow on you know. I was determined to hit that water so I did. I didn’t chill. I didn’t get cold or anything. It didn’t hurt me one bit. He had helped me and I never felt so clean in all my life as I did whenever I come out of there.

I have had several sad times in my life, losing my dad, my mother and my sisters and my granddaughter. I lost a granddaughter, she was about sixteen, due to drugs. It was terrible, that was very bad. 

I think that the doctors need to quit giving them pills. They started out just giving them to ‘em in handfuls, I guess, that’s a matter of speech about it. But they just give them too much. They got it started and with that and everything else, drinking and everything, you know. I can’t say that she had a big lot of drugs in her system. She had two different kinds that weren’t supposed to be mixed with each other and she was with the wrong crowd. 

Have no idea [what the area will look like in ten to twenty years] but I know I won’t be here. But I don’t know…my mother lived to be one hundred and ten years old. 

I’d like to see it just more or less the same, the fields kept clean, the houses repaired and stuff like that. There’s not much jobs for people. Oh, I’ve seen it change a lot. The coals mines was a great business around here. It was a booming business. Everybody had jobs in the mine. When they had jobs in the mines, most everybody had insurance and they could go to the doctors. Now, even if you have insurance you always get a big bill from them if you go. I mean it don’t take care of a lot of stuff. 

They [the media] think we don’t have any sense, you know. Well, I guess our sense comes from doing. Experience, things like that. It’s like this; they have to go to the store for every meal they eat. Well, we always have our can stuff, our stuff in the freezer. If nothing else, we’d go out and pick plants or something like that in the springtime. And we loved it. Raised greens put them in the freezer, beans, corn, potatoes and cabbage. [My favorite Appalachian meal] Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and cole slaw!

Hillbilly means that I live in the country, and I can go bare feet if I want to. But there is so many people in the city that are going barefooted now; they’ve picked it up off of us.”

Morgan Canty

Morgan Canty, Age 21, College Student/Server at his family’s restaurant; Bristol, Tennessee:

“I’ve lived here all my life. I lived in the Virginia side for part of my life, and the over on the Tennessee side. 

It was a good place to live, calm, not too much going on. Peaceful. As a child, we went to the YMCA a whole lot. Played in the parks [and] played at the fountain down the street at the Memorial Park. We did a lot of singing. 

(His singing) It started as me listening to some old jazz singers when I was a kid, and I used to do impressions of it; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, stuff like that. Eventually, I was like, ‘oh, well, I can sing and I like singing so I’m gonna do that.’

[Liked jazz as a kid] mostly ‘cause I liked the way they ‘scatted.’ My mom and dad [are into] music. My mom sings, too. I’ve got four brothers. No sisters. Me and my brother are the only ones into music. My mom is the musical parent. She sings a lot of gospel at home [and] sometimes at churches when we visit. 

I’d like to be a recording artist. The music makes me feel good. I can express myself through it. And also, it’s another way to tell a story. One of my friends, he’s an actor, and that’s probably the best way to describe music and acting, is storytelling. I mean it’s a great way to get [something] across, and you can do it in as many words as you want, or even in a few words. Basically, you get the emotion of a song by how someone’s singing it, so that’s why songs are usually a chorus and a repeat. 

I did a show over at the Paramount (Bristol) for the Tenors at Noon Series, which is a showcase of local talent and artists that they do during the summer. It’s every other Friday. I did mostly songs with the piano. I had my brother play the piano [and] I sang a little bit of everything. Little bit of Otis Redding, TLC, some Macy Gray, some Michael Jackson, a lot of different stuff. 

I would have to say [Appalachia] has it’s own culture going on. It’s like all the different kinds of music are branched out from this region. You’ve got bluegrass and you’ve also got this mountain music sound. 

I hear it from a lot of people that visit here, they ask why people are so nice here, and I’m like ‘I don’t know, that’s the way people act.’ That’s how people are. 

Growing up here, I’ve learned a lot [about] how to treat other people. I’ve met so many different people from going to school in this area and working down here at the restaurant. You meet every type of person imaginable. I’ve learned about working. Almost everybody here is a working person. 

I’d definitely say [one lesson learned is] that hard work pays off. Having faith in what you’re doing. That’s another important thing. Believing it. 

Cooking’s been a big deal in my family. We cook every day. Holidays are big in our family. Sunday dinner is big in our family. They cook everything. Have lobster for certain holidays, switch it over and have fried chicken, turkey and dressing.


On Christmas Eve, we usually have a beef brisket or something like that. We’ll have lobster with that, and some roasted potatoes with garlic, vegetables and some type of punch. Then the next day, on Christmas, we’ll have turkey and dressing, sweet potatoes, and baked mac and cheese. That’s something the whole family cooks, not just my mom. Everybody will meet down here at the restaurant, or we’ll meet up at my grandfather’s house up in Glade [Glade Springs, Virginia].

My father’s parents, I never actually got to meet his father. He passed away before I was born. His mother, she lived here in the area for a long time. Now she resides in Atlanta. My mom’s parents, my grandmother passed away a couple of years ago, and my grandfather is still alive. 

We spend a lot of time at my grandparents’ house. My grandmother, she loved to cook. Both of my grandmothers loved to cook. My grandmother, Marge Coleman, she cooked everything. And that was something she learned from her mom, ‘cause I believe it was her mom that used to be a cook in people’s houses. 

My grandfather, he likes to cook. He likes to do a whole lot of gardening, and he’s always been a worker. He served in the Army, I believe it was the Korean War, and then after that, they came back and he lived up in Glade Springs and it was hard for them to get a job, I remember being told. They worked at a couple of different jobs and then finally he was able to land a job at the Appalachian Power. He worked there for a long time and retired. My grandmother, she was a nurse up in, I believe, it was Abingdon [Virginia] Hospital. 

What is life? Life. Life’s a journey. That’s my best explanation. [My journey] is going good. I’ve hit some road bumps along the way but I feel like in the end, it’s not about exactly being perfect, but it’s how far you’ve come.

One [bump in the road] is about being frustrated about singing. Trying to figure out where do you go from here. Do you move to the big city or do you stay here? ‘Cause big city’s [are] completely different. And acting. That’s one of my bumps. School, going to college. Trying to figure out what to major in, ‘cause I’ve switched so many times. 

I want to move to Los Angeles. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be like. I want to go out there and visit. I’d tried to go out there this summer, but it didn’t work out for me to go out this summer which means it’ll probably work out better for me to go in the fall. 

I expect it to be completely different. What I’ve heard about the city is crime and not knowing anybody, which is different than being at home. There’s not that person you can just reach out and lean on, especially when you don’t know anybody.

I feel like one thing [that’s different about Appalachia is] most police officers in the area know me, my family, which is a good thing. I know people. You can walk around on the streets of Bristol, and not really worry about somebody attacking you, stealing your money, that stuff. There’s a low crime rate in the area. 

There’s a unity that’s in these communities and part of being in the South, or I guess in the Eastern Tennessee or Southwest Virginia area, there’s a sense of community. You talk to your neighbors. You wave at people on the street. You say hi to people you don’t even know. Ask how they’re doing.

[Racial profiling] does happen here. It’s happened to me and my family multiple times. At times, it can be humiliating, especially when you know you’re not doing anything wrong. 

One time in particular, me and my mom were followed to our house. We pulled into the driveway, and they [police] flashed their lights and stuff. Made us show ID to basically prove that we lived in the neighborhood. We live in an all white neighborhood, but it’s nothing fancy or upscale or anything. They told us the reason was they were making sure we lived in that house. 

Sometimes, you get pulled over for something and they’re looking for something and they assume you have something, but there’s nothing wrong. Eventually, after they start talking to you, they’re like, ‘well, this is a good kid.’ That’s what it ends up turning out to be. 

I think at times we avoid the talk about race. I feel like we need to talk about it. If you ask any of my friends, I will talk about race at any point, anywhere. And for people, if you haven’t talked about it, it gets uncomfortable. I think that’s where you break down those walls of fear, and you take away those prejudices when you get to know people: when you’ve been over there, and you’ve talked to those people, black and white, or any other race; when you start talking to each other and you start learning about [them]. 

Me and my best friend, we’re complete opposites on [the] political spectrum, completely different backgrounds, different news channels, everything, but we’re tight. We can talk about the President, we can talk about anything without getting into a fist fight. We agree on a lot of stuff, which we never thought we’d agree on. 

You talk to somebody, you find out exactly who they are. 

To people that are not from the area, sometimes they’ll sense a little bit of this Appalachian accent, but I wouldn’t self describe myself as a hillbilly. It’s funny, ‘cause I’m taking a History of Tennessee class, and we had to do a whole chapter about that. I don’t know if I have a regional label. I’d say [I’m] an Appalachian. 

We’re [Appalachians] usually viewed as either being less clean or not as smart. I don’t even know where the stereotypes come from exactly, but sometimes we can be viewed like when we’re talking about negative stereotypes, as under the level of everyone else on certain stuff. But the view is how people in Appalachia act. It’s usually kind, unless you run into some rednecks who just don’t like anybody that’s an outsider!

[On how to change outsider’s perspectives of Appalachia] Well one thing that can be alarming [is] where some people in Appalachia haven’t been outside of Appalachia, or haven’t really had that encounter, like a lot of the old people here. 

Meet people. Meet different people. Different backgrounds, races, religions. Different things, cause there’s a saying here, ‘tell your kids not to talk to outsiders’ even though the person right next door could be getting ready to do something to you. 

Greatest triumph? I want to say keeping it together. I’d say staying ‘me’ through the years, which is kind of hard to do, especially when you’re younger. And, still keeping my eye on goals. 

My mom and dad started out regular. You gotta start somewhere, and they worked their way up, and told me that in life you’re not going to be handed stuff. 

And even when you’re given stuff, you’ve gotta keep working to keep it.”