Andrew Preston

“I’m not an Appalachian stereotype. I am New Appalachia. I am Modern Appalachia. Neo-Appalachia, that’s a good word for it.”

Andrew Preston, 22, Mental Health Worker, Student, Kentucky Center for Traditional Music, Morehead State; Morehead, Kentucky:

“I am originally from Van Lear, Kentucky. Van Lear is in Eastern Kentucky, between Prestonsburg and Paintsville in Johnson County. It’s [the] home of Loretta Lynn. I’m from a very atypical family. We were all sort of the black sheep of our family. We had a really small family. We grew up right in the heart of Van Lear, right next to the Historical Society. We all just piled into my great-grandmother’s house. It was an old coalhouse [and] we all took turns livin’ there over the years. 

I moved to downtown Paintsville, when I was about 5 or 6, I believe. But we still visited Van Lear, because that’s where my grandparents were. I still love it [and] love going back. We recently played with my band in Van Lear for Van Lear Days. It was the first time I’d been back in a couple of years. The stage ended up being right in front of the house that I grew up in, which was really surreal. I never thought I’d be playing bluegrass music right in front of the house that I was raised in. 

[As kids] We just played outside. I had toys and stuff, but it seemed like you had more fun making mud pies and that kind of thing. I remember one of my friends and I, he was my neighbor, we went and bought a big thing of Elmer’s Glue and we tried to make cement out of mud. We would just play outside all day, catching fireflies and that kind of thing. 

My grandmother raised me, so she feels like my mom. And my great-grandparents felt like my grandparents. They were really great people. I was really, really close to my great-grandmother. She was a great cook. She was really funny. She really liked to say kind of profane things a lot. It was pretty funny because she was this cute old woman. I always have to tell this story; it’s kind of grim. She was getting up there in age; she was in her sixties at this point. I was really young. She was brushing her teeth at the sink and I ran up and hugged her legs. I was like, ‘I love you, Grandma,’ and then she fell over and broke her ribs in the bathtub. I’m laughing because she was laughing (not at the time). And then a couple months later, I was over and I was sleeping on her couch. I was spending the night there and I jumped up out of the couch in the morning because I was so excited – landed on her and broke her ribs again. Two times in a couple months’ span. She was not happy about that (laughs). But she was an awesome woman. She was really strong. 

She was a poet. She wrote beautiful poetry. I recently worked on a song where I found one of her old poems she had stored away in a Bible. I tried to transpose it into music to keep that going. They’re really lengthy. This particular one was called, ‘One Rose.’ It was a very sad poem. It was about growing up in the country, and seeing on television the world passing by you and feeling isolated. I think that speaks to a lot of people around here, feeling isolated. 

My mom was so young – she was 16 when I was born – they [my grandparents] were raising her and me. By the time she was in her twenties and moving out on her own with my dad, I was attached to the area and to my grandparents, so I just stayed around. My biological father I never met. The man that I considered my father, I didn’t really know him a whole lot, either. He worked at a telephone company. My parents got divorced when I was maybe 13 or so, and I haven’t really talked to him since then. My mom and I are really close because of that, because she was so young and we did grow up together. I think that’s what keeps us so close. 

She [my mom] is an incredible woman. She’s artistic and talented. She sings – she swears she can’t, but she has a beautiful singing voice. She’s an artist. She’s a poet. A great visual artist, too. Loves animals; I get that from her. She just brought a cat up to my house last night because we had a mice problem, but I wouldn’t kill the mice and she wouldn’t kill the mice, so we brought a cat to scare off the mice. She’s really passionate about nature and animals and her spiritual voyage.

I liked high school a lot. I hated elementary school; I felt really out of place. I was a shy and insecure kind of kid. I don’t know what happened in high school, it just seemed I sort of blossomed. I made a lot of friends, great friends I still talk to everyday. I did really well academically, which I’m proud of, because we get this rep from being from Appalachia that we’re not terribly bright. I think I’m pretty bright. I got a lot out of high school, had a lot of opportunities. Went to Johnson Central High. We were a real lucky school, because we had all kinds of great chances. I got to travel. That’s where I learned to play music. I had a great band director, Tommy Money. 

A lot of people get [educated about music] through that oral tradition; they grew up in musical families, but I didn’t. My family was poets and visual artists, but they never listened to a whole lot of music around me. They listened to the ‘80s and that kind of thing. It’s interesting, because I got a lot of my inspiration for music from old handheld Nintendo games. You can hear that in my music. I’ve found a niche market online [for] my music – a lot of people refer to it as folk-tronica. There’s a lot of those 8-bit electronic sounds, but it’s mixed with that roots music. 

I’m a college student up at the Kentucky Center for Traditional Music and I’m always tellin’ everyone, ‘Well, you know, that’s sort of my tradition.’ In my generation, we grew up with those electronic sounds and that experimental nature is part of our music. Back in the day, people didn’t have access to classical music; they didn’t have these big pianos and these classical music teachers and training. So they would go down and play their uncle’s banjo. That was a form of experimentation. That carries on in a different way now, but it’s still that resourcefulness and that artistic-ness that we have in the mountains here. 
My great-grandmother had an old air pump organ. I would play ‘Silent Night’ and Christmas songs at Christmas when I was maybe five. I taught myself guitar when I was about 12, and I started writing songs [at that time]. The first song I ever wrote, I wrote it in music class on the piano. It was a little ragtime tune that was called, ‘Cats, Cats, Cats.’ It was about cats (laughs). I love ragtime. I love all kinds of music. I try to not just play folk music because all kinds of music are beautiful, and they’re all part of our culture now because of the internet. I was real young when I started, and I’ve been playin’ and writing ever since. 

I play about 14 instruments. I teach a lot of music, primarily guitar and piano. I sing. Ukulele is one of my favorite instruments. I love Hawaiian folk music. I think there are a lot of parallels to Appalachian music people don’t think about. I play the penny whistle, the harmonica, the bass, upright bass, and keyboards. I’m pretty good with electronic synthesizers, banjo, and fiddle. The custom instruments are always the best ones, because they’re fine-tuned for you. 

I was really blessed to be accepted into the International Bluegrass Music Association Songwriting Showcase this year. I’ll be performing in Raleigh, North Carolina. It’s a song called, ‘The Mountain Wayfarers’ that I wrote. It’s about two people that fall in love in the mountains. The first line is:

I know when I grow oldI’ll grow like hazel in the cold wet snow.I did not foresee a lonesome soulWho’d melt me even when the cold wind blows.

There’s a line in there, ‘You got the wild of the mountain in you, child.’ That line really speaks to me, because there’s a freedom in people that you fall in love with, especially around here. I tend to gravitate toward people that remind me of home, the mountains and that freedom of living here. I write a lot about that, a lot about nature and the mountains in general. It’s really inspiring to me.

I just got my degree in psychology and I’m finishing a second degree in music. For years, I wanted to be a psychologist. I was a very good psychologist. I did a lot of research on Appalachia and art and music, and stigma associated with Appalachia and the art and music industry and the LGBT community and minorities. I’m very passionate about my research and mental health. I was set to graduate, I was elected commencement speaker, I was the Valedictorian, I guess, of my university, which was an incredible honor and I’d never dreamed I’d have the opportunity like that. But, I realized I was a good student, I was a good psychologist, but I wasn’t necessarily a happy psychologist. I was putting my art behind me. And so I declined to speak. I declined my graduation for another year so I could stay at the Kentucky Center for Traditional Music and fine-tune my musical skills. 

I want to continue my musical research; I want to teach. And I’m doing that. But I am a musician at heart. I am a songwriter, and I want to continue doing that. I’m very passionate about doing that for a living. My friend [and I] formed a band. We’ve been playing all over this summer. It’s been one of the happiest times of my life, playing with him. We met in college; we had the same guitar teacher. He kind of implied, ‘You guys are both really weird. You should probably pair up and write some music together.’ So we did, and it worked really well. We love those Everly Brother kinds of harmonies, and we like to mix it with interesting sounds, and just experiment. You got to have fun with it. If you’re not experimenting, it’s not art. [Our band is] The Mountain Sound. It’s funny, because we intentionally chose a pretentious and self-aware, but vague name for our band because we don’t just play folk music. We do a lot of electronic and experimental music within the realm of folk music. But that is the mountain sound nowadays. The mountain sound is evolving, and it still encompasses that resourcefulness of the mountains and our people. 

Growin’ up, I didn’t [have a connection to roots music] either. I listened to punk rock. I listened to a lot of experimental music, electronica. As I got older, I wanted to move away. I didn’t like it here. I felt out of place. I felt like my values and my lifestyle didn’t fit in in Appalachia. But as I got older, I realized, it did. It is an embracing place. As you grow, you start to fall back in love with where you’re from, and you see, at least, I hope that you see, the good in this area, in how many artistic and incredible people there are. I realized the parts of the music that I loved, no matter what the genre were, were parts that were so common in traditional and folk music. It’s the stories and the connection it has with your roots, with your culture. I’m only 22, but the more and more I played bluegrass, the more I fell in love with it, the folk music and the words just started to resonate with me. It changed the way I write. It made me really appreciate where it came from.

I find myself feeling more and more like her [my grandmother] everyday. Like I said, she was a poet, she was an artistic soul, she was very kind. She was blunt; I like to be blunt. She didn’t care about what other people thought. She was an activist in her own right, in a lot of ways. She wasn’t necessarily forward enough to say that back then, but I get that from her. I’m a very forward person. I like to stand by what I believe in, and help people, and I think I get all that from her. There’s a lot that I support. I’m a mental health professional; I support the wellbeing of others. Lately back home, there’s a lot of flack against minorities of all types: sexual minorities, racial minorities and religious minorities. We just got to learn, in Appalachia that’s what we stand for. We want to embrace people and bring them into our community. Everybody’s one of us. That’s what I stand for. I want to fight for everyone’s rights. Everyone deserves that. I want my music to speak to that, too, and my art. I wouldn’t say I’m an activist because I’m not a terribly aggressive person, for the most part. But I am an activist because I support those things, openly and proudly.

Back home I didn’t really resonate, when I was younger, with the area. I’d see things on TV and I would think, ‘Oh, that’s hilarious and that’s so true, people are hillbillies like that.’ Then when I leave, I do all those things. I went to Chicago for a psychology conference last year with my guitar teacher. We went to this Italian restaurant. We were so confused because it was just set up so different than restaurants around here. I’ve never felt like more of a redneck than when I was in that restaurant. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was funny, because people do portray us like that, and some of the stereotypes are true. But some of the things they portray aren’t necessarily bad. I’ve learned to embrace it. I like the culture and I know how to laugh at myself, at the things that I do that are similar to the stereotypes. 

But, there are things that shouldn’t be portrayed. We aren’t unintelligent. We aren’t all poor. I grew up in a poor family, but a lot of my friends were wealthy middleclass folks, just as kind as anyone else. I think we need to broaden our horizons. Everything about Appalachia to me is breaking the mold. Appalachia is a culture, but it’s not a stereotype anymore. I’m not an Appalachian stereotype. I am New Appalachia, I am Modern Appalachia. Neo-Appalachia, that’s a good word for it.

We have the internet and we have people traveling all over the world, but we still keep that resourcefulness and that creativity in the mountains. No matter what we’re doing, what music we’re playing, what our art looks like. Things are changing, but we still keep that creativity and that genuineness and that embrace of the mountains. We feel a little isolated in the mountains, but that’s where the culture grows. That’s what Neo-Appalachia is; embracing the modern, but appreciating the roots. 

I don’t want to be remembered on a wide scale. I want to be remembered by the individuals in my life. As I grow and I meet new people, I find that connecting on that individual level is what keeps me going. Everybody has something to bring; everybody has a story to tell. Whatever someone wants to take from me, if they hate me, if they don’t hate me, if they love my music…I met a man from China that translated some of my lyrics into Chinese. That really touched me. I don’t know if he’ll remember me, but that’s a way that I can speak to people that you can’t any way else.“

Robin Wentz

“A little girl, the first day of school I asked her what bus she rode, and she said, ‘At yaller un.’ (Laughs).

Robin Wentz, Retired Schoolteacher, Playwright; Grayson, Kentucky:

“[I taught] ‘turd’ grade (laughs). [Been retired] five years. I have been on the Board of Directors at the Grayson Gallery and Art Center, I substitute teach, and then I have homebound children. I’ve got into playwriting, and I wrote a play called “Traipsin’ Woman: The Jean Thomas Story” and performed it. I got a grant for $10,000 to bring the east and west parts of Carter County [Kentucky] together in a project last summer.

My mother was Lucille Marshall, from Willard, Kentucky. During the ‘50s, the sewing factory in Olive Hill was really big, so her and her sister and cousin got a little apartment in Olive Hill and they all met Olive Hill boys. So, my father’s from the west end and my mother’s from the east end of the county. They had four children [and] we all grew up here. Growin’ up here was always [a] neighborhood environment. You could ride your bike up and down the main highways. We camped out a lot as children, and built forts. Lots of ballgames and ridin’ horses.

I didn’t decide [to be a teacher] until I went to Morehead to take some childcare classes in college. I loved every minute of it. I love the children. When I first started teaching, I took it to heart and worried about the kids eating. Being from Appalachia, I did not realize that children were coming to school hungry. I always worked around the system and did things my way. 

I did a lot of singing to the kids and lovin’ on ‘em. Appalachian stories. A little girl, the first day of school, I asked her what bus she rode, and she said, “‘At yaller un” [That yellow one] (laughs). 

With Facebook, I keep in touch with a lot of my students, especially this year. I had Brianna Colley Shaffer. Both of my students married each other. She’s a new teacher this year. We kept in contact. She thanked me, and said that I had touched her life and made her hope she could be as good a teacher as me. I’m really close to a lot of my students. Another little student has a lot of health problems, and she helped me write a song about Grayson. We recorded it two years ago. Still being from this town, I get a lot of hugs in the grocery stores. 

I want people to remember that I was a good, caring teacher.

To me, [being] Appalachian is having close family roots. I’m still real close to my cousins and my aunts and uncles. I think that more than anything, close family. My grandparents [were] from Willard, Kentucky. My grandmother, Sarah Pennington Marshall, she liked to squirrel hunt and fish. I’ve watched her wring many a chicken neck, and then watched her go fry it for Sunday dinner. Papaw, Austin ‘Hot Pipe’ Marshall, worked in the coalmines. Hot Pipe, he had a temper. I’ve been called Hot Pipe quite a few times (laughs). He built bridges after [working in the coalmines]. He had black lung. I was there [at my grandparents’] every week. We all were. All the cousins, aunts and uncles were there every Sunday. We’d play in the barns and jump out the windows and climb up the apple trees and ride the limbs down. Papaw’d come out, ‘Get out of my cherry tree!’ We still talk about that.

We have a lot of singers in our family, [and] there was always spiritual singing. So, we had a lot of song and good food; lots of babies. She’s [Grandma’s] a really good cook, country cook. Fried chicken, chocolate pie, and green beans. We would go out in the cellar after playin’ on the hillside. We’d go in the cellar and get an ear of pickled corn out of the churn. I don’t know how you make pickled corn! Pickled corn, the way my mom fixes it is, she fries it and puts bacon grease in it and just a little bit of sugar. Good with soup beans.

My mom and her family grew up poor. My mom danced and they put her in a play. They took what money they had and ordered her a pair of real black, black patent leather shoes out of Sears. She danced and danced in those at the school play. I like that one [story].

I’m a hillbilly. That means I talk country. I give hugs. I don’t meet a stranger. I’m hard-workin’. I’ve thought about that a lot [the way outsiders view us]. I’m in the grant writing business. I think the outsiders think of us as dumb hillbillies, maybe lazy, and not successful in life. The truth is, that Appalachian people are the most down-to-earth people. They take pride in their community and love their family.

The art gallery [Grayson Gallery & Art Center] has been here for three years. We renovated the old firehouse. I think it has brought out artists in people who never knew they were an artist. It allows the people in this area to have a place to bring their art and see art from around our region. Our community, in the past few years, has brought out so many talented artists. Hopefully, through social media, this is getting out. What talented artists and what hard-working people we have in this community. 

(Traditions passed down) Storytelling. They [my grandparents] did a lot of that when they were young. Through my storytelling, I wrote a play called “The Traipsin’ Woman: The Jean Thomas Story.” The play was performed through a grant, through Brushy Fork Institution in Berea, Kentucky. It told the story of Jean Thomas from Boyd County. She was a court stenographer in the ‘30s. She traveled with judges and loggers all over Southern Appalachia. When she would get into a town, she was interested in the music and the stories of Appalachia, so she wrote books and kept very accurate records of their music. My play was the classroom setting. They would teach about the folk dances and the music during that time. Then it would do a flashback to a wedding scene in the ‘30s, and dancin’ the Virginia Reel. And then it’d flash back to the classroom again to set up for the next scene, which we told of the blind fiddler from Morehead that became world renowned. Played for the Queen of England. (Whispers) I can’t remember [his name].

It was a cold spring at my grandmother’s house. The chickens – called ‘em little biddies – the little biddies was freezing, so she made ‘em clothes (laughs). They were all running around with little outfits on. They had company one day, and she was embarrassed. But the joke was that the rooster was chasing the hens, and you should have seen him trying to get his galluses down, chasing those hens.”

Devyn Creech

“I truly do believe that people don’t really understand what it’s like to be here, and how hard it is to be in it.”

Devyn Creech, AmeriCorps Worker; Middlesboro, Kentucky;

“I was born in Whitesburg, Kentucky. I grew up in Cumberland, but also in Partridge, which is right across the Letcher County border. It was a lot of fun [growing up in the mountains]. My Mom lived in Partridge, my Dad lived in Cumberland. My Mom, her parents, her two brothers, her sister, one of her brothers’ wives, and their little girl all lived together on Collier’s Creek in Letcher County. 

We had a big, huge yard. We had this big hill behind our house. We would ride bikes, scooters, boxes, whatever down this hill. We would play in the mud, run around barefoot, the typical things. My favorite memory from living there is when, in the wintertime, we had that big yard that’d get covered in snow and my Uncle Arf would actually tie a sled to the back of his four-wheeler and take us all around the yard. It was really, really fun, for the most part. 

And then, you’d go to Cumberland, and it’s kind of a different world, too, because you’ve got parks nearby. You could have all the neighborhood kids and go play at the parks. I’d say it was a pretty good childhood.

My parents, in my memory, I never remember them being married. They were 18 when I was born, and they were married for a little while, maybe a couple months, but it didn’t last long. 

I went to the new high school, Harlan County High School. I’m a Black Bear. For me, it was kind of hard, I guess. Being a teenager’s hard. Being a teenager in the mountains is hard (laughs). I mostly did theater the entire time I was in high school. If I could skip a class to go to the theater, I would. I did everything I could: I made costumes, I wrote scripts, I directed, and stage managed, and helped build props. It was just an escape for me. All four years of high school were pretty much in the theater.

I always felt like my potential had a cap. Like, no matter how hard I tried, or how much good I did, I couldn’t succeed here. My mom, especially, always told me that success is leaving and finding a job somewhere else. It’s almost like working at a fast food restaurant in Lexington is better than working at a fast food restaurant in Harlan. I always felt growing up really conflicted, and angry, and confused, because this was my home and this was where I wanted to be. 
I didn’t quite know it was where I wanted to be yet because I’d always been told I shouldn’t want it. So, growing up I always said, ‘I’m going to go away to college.’ And I went away to college. And I came back. That’s what made me realize all of the things I just said. That I had been told my entire life that this wasn’t the place to be.

I went to MSU, Morehead State University. I majored in theater. I got a full-ride theater scholarship there, all four years paid for. And I left. That’s just three hours away, it’s still in Kentucky, but nothing seemed right. I got real, real sad, and I failed out. I came back home. I feel like the stars kind of aligned to make that happen. I’m much happier here.

I directed the most recent edition [of] Higher Ground Five: Find a Way. I co-directed the big production with my friend Austin Rutherford. Higher Ground started in 2005. It was a group of people who said, ‘How do we talk about the prescription drug abuse problem here?’ I was not involved then. Virtually 200 community members provided oral histories for us to transcribe into a script. And then, 80 community members actually acted in the first production. Since then, we’ve had five productions, and each one has been used to tackle different sensitive issues within the community. 

The most recent one, we address the grief over loss of coal jobs, a just economic transition. We talked about the education system and acceptance of homosexuality in the community. We’ve talked a lot about family units, kids pawned off onto grandparents, families destroyed by drugs. I think everybody we’ve had has had something to do with drug abuse. I think it’s making a difference because I see the reputation we’ve built up with the community. The community trusts us enough to let us talk about these things. These things like loss of coal jobs, which is very, very sensitive for people around here to talk about. They let us get up on stage and sing and dance about it. So, in my mind, the fact that these people are even letting Higher Ground exist is success in itself.

Robert Gipe [Higher Ground creator] is one of my best friends and my mentor. He is one of the strangest people I’ve ever met and probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He has a heart for this place like not many people do. More so than him being worried about his own credit, or what he’s going to do, he’s worried about providing for us, for the younger generation. That’s why I got to direct, because he said, ‘This isn’t ours, in the future, it’s theirs.’

I honestly look up to Robert, I adore him. I don’t really know many people that don’t like him. Robert and I work in close quarters. My office, which is just a table, is right outside of his office. You go into his office and it’s all of these random pieces of art and flyers and pieces of paper, the plastic off of water bottles, all this stuff. He’s always walking around with his nose in a notebook and drawing with his head down the entire time. 

I don’t know if any of you have ever seen Higher Ground; he has done some pretty funny roles in that. He’s the only man in his 50s that I have seen jump in the way that I’ve seen him jump and run. He’s just a really nice guy that lives on Ivy Hill with his old yellow dog. He just published a book called ‘Trampoline’, which, for someone coming out of Harlan County, it’s literally just living literature of what it’s like to grow up here. I think that everyone should read Trampoline whether they’re from here or not. Robert’s [originally] from Kingsport [Tennessee].

[What makes Appalachia special?] My go-to answer is always the people. It’s one of the only places I feel like you can just drive down the road and get waved at by people you don’t even know. If there’s some kind of tragedy, you can guarantee that somebody’s going to be at your door with some kind of food, like, ‘I made this for you because I know that you’re going through a hard time and, you know, we have to stick together.’

I feel like there’s a type of community here that a lot of people anywhere in the world don’t have. There’s a lot of Appalachian pride and stubbornness, but for the most part, my entire life, I’ve just seen all of the people from here stick together and stay together. It’s like a big, giant family unit. I felt like the whole community’s raised me, not just my family.

I truly do believe that people don’t really understand what it’s like to be here, and how hard it is to be in it. Everywhere I go, people mostly make fun of my accent. They immediately think that I’m not an intelligent person because of the way I talk. Aside from that: the typical inbreeders, that they make mention of. ‘You marry and love your cousins.’ Barefoot and pregnant’s one that I’ve heard a lot: ‘All the young girls over there are barefoot and pregnant.’ And, ‘We can’t help ourselves,’ that’s what people think. Even though I feel like we are the most self-sufficient people in this country right now.

We are some of the most self-sufficient people in the world. And some of the most interesting. More than anything, we need camaraderie, not people telling us how to fix our problems or what to do, but people who are willing to support this place, especially people from this place. If most of those people from those [media] networks could sit down and talk to a lot of the people from here, instead of going and trying to find all the worst things they possibly can, they would learn that it’s really, really a beautiful place for so many different reasons.

I think [the future of Appalachia, economically] is a whole lot of stuff. I think that it’s the arts and I think that it’s ecotourism. I think that we’ve already got a pretty booming medical field. For the most part though, from my experience, it’s going to be along the arts line and ecotourism. There’s a lot of grassroots organizing here and small town entrepreneurship that I see. All of these little segments are going to fit together into a bigger picture. 

[To fix the drug problem] I know for me growing up, it was always just, ‘Don’t do drugs. Drugs are bad and they’ll kill you.’ But nobody ever really taught me about them. Nobody ever said, ‘This is what this does, this is what that does.’ It was always, ‘This’ll rot your teeth out, make you go crazy. You’ll probably kill yourself.’ It’s so accessible here! 

I could just go to my doctor right now and say, ‘I’m having a little anxiety,’ and he’d put me on a nerve pill immediately, probably. There’s so many people who treat nerve medication and pain medication as a permanent fix. When in terms of nerve medication, that stuff’s meant to be a band-aid to help you get better, not for you to use forever. 

There are so many people broke down and so many people that have mental illness that they [the medical profession] don’t know what else to do. How do you help entire communities beside medicate ‘em? Part of it is expectation for people. That’s what’s expected from around here. It’s very normalized around here. I’ve had family members who if I’d been like, ‘Oh I’m sick,’ they’ll be like, ‘Here, have a Xanax. Here have this, here have that.’ It’s normalized to the point where family units treat it like it’s Benadryl. 

It’s really sad. I also feel the hopelessness around here – drugs are a quick way to make you feel good. People think that’s the way to go. Whenever you’re sittin’ at home and you’re thinking, ‘Okay, my electricity’s gonna get cut off,’ or ‘I can’t feed my kids,’ or ‘I can’t do this,’ and you’re lost in this helplessness, you lean on whatever you can. They become vices. People just pop it like it’s Tic Tacs.

I’m a hillbilly. To me, it means that I can figure things out on my own if I need to. I’m not scared of hard work. I’m not scared to cook and clean and fix things and try my hardest.

My mom moved to Bell County whenever I was very young, and my dad stayed in Harlan County. I lived in Bell County for a long time until I was 14. There was always some kind of weird emptiness there. My mom got married and moved to Lexington. I didn’t want to go to Lexington. I said, ‘Well, I want to go to Harlan. I want to go live with dad.’ 

It turned into a two-year long court battle when I was 14 years old. I was old enough to understand everything that was happening. I was old enough to understand that I was hurting my mom. A series of events had definitely made me want to be with my father, who’s one of my best friends. Mom just kept appealing and appealing and appealing and we had to go back again and again and again. To see what that did to her and to my family, it was really hard.

My dad, Richie Creech, is the best dad in the world, first of all. Whenever I was little, he worked in factories and stuff. After a while he went to barber school. He was a barber in Cumberland. It was him and Odell. He was a barber for years and years and years, like 10 years. He’s a youth minister at Lewis Creek Pentecostal Church in Letcher County and he gives everything to those kids. 

He buys them clothes, he buys them presents, he throws them parties, he feeds them. He is definitely like a parent to them. While I was in high school, he went back to college because he didn’t get to go when I was born, he was so young. He went back to college to be a psychologist. Now, he works with kids, 5-10 year-olds. I think that he’s a good man because he’s dedicated his entire life to helping other people, especially the ones that can’t help it, like kids who don’t have control over their situations, who don’t have control over their lives. He is just a big, huge heart walking around.

I’ll tell you about the worst camping trip we’ve ever been on. I think this was whenever I was kind of coming into being a teenager, and your Dad is weirded out, like, ‘My little girl wears bras. She’s becoming a woman.’ So he kind of forced the camping trip. He was like, ‘We’re going on a camping trip.’ I just wanted to play video games and talk on Facebook all day. But we went on this trip. I had to have been 12, 13. 

The first night there, the air mattress totally collapsed and we were just sleeping on rocks on the ground. The next morning, all of our breakfast blew off the grill onto the ground. He was like, ‘Okay, okay, we’re just gonna go fishing.’ He had all kinds of bait in one of those bait traps you hook to your side that you carry with you. We were going wade fishing. 

Well, somewhere between walking down the river and getting to where we wanted to actually fish, all the bait swam out. So we didn’t have any bait. And then, I can’t remember who fell down first, but dad fell down and hurt his shins pretty hard. And then I fell in a hole between a bunch of rocks. Dad thought I broke my leg, but I just busted my knee up and my foot up. He had to limp down the road to get the car to find a way to come and get me from the riverbank. 
It also rained the entire time (laughs). It was just really bad. But I was glad I have that experience with him. I like to have that memory now. I don’t know if I’ve ever been camping since.

(Happiest time) Last fall was pretty good. I’ve lived on my own since I was 18, pretty much right out of high school. I had gone off to school and come back, and I just felt like a failure in a lot of ways. So last fall is right around the time that I first moved back to Bell County. For the first time, I was working with Higher Ground. I felt very fulfilled there because I felt like, for the first time, that I was doing theater with a purpose. And that purpose was to help the place that I loved the most. 

That had been most of my problem with MSU, is that it was Shakespeare and all these plays that were cool, but that 100 people had done before and that didn’t fix anything inside of me. I just felt really empty. So I had been working with Higher Ground and that had come out of nowhere. And it was a paying job, in the place that I loved the most, where you can’t hardly find a job, let alone a fulfilling job, as an artist. 

I also got a dog last fall, that is my best friend, named Harley. It was a lot of really good things happening for me. For the first time in my life, I was like, ‘I don’t really need a boyfriend, I don’t really need anyone. I’ve got myself, and my dog, and Higher Ground, and I’m happy. I’ve got a place to live and I have food.’ 

I got a position with an organization called AmeriCorps, who stations workers in low-income communities to help with community projects. I’ll be working under Robert Gipe again. I’ve signed on for a year, and at the end of this year they’ll give me $5,000 to go to my college. I go for training later in the month. I’m also going back to school this fall. I hope that goes well. 

I don’t feel right if I’m not here. I’ve been to northern parts of the country, and where it’s all flat. My family’s from Maryland, so I’ve been there. I feel kind of like a prey animal unless I’m in this little bowl. So I feel like I will spend the rest of my life here. I definitely don’t have any whims at all, to leave now. 

[The mountains provide] Comfort. Comfort, foremost. I wish I could explain it. Everywhere I’ve went my whole life (and my Mom’s taken me out of the country) – nowhere ever really felt right except for here. I don’t know if that’s just growing up, and it’s like a big hug, all the time, or what. I’ve heard it [the mountains] described that [a big hug] by a couple people. My Papaw used to say that. It’s the strangest, calmest kind of excitement. It’s not the kind where you jump up and down; it’s like a sigh of relief, to just drive into it and think, ‘Okay, this is home. This is where I’m supposed to be.’

[My grandparents have passed on a legacy to me of] A giving nature. Kindness. All of my grandparents are the kind of people that will give you the shirt off their back. Money matters nothing, and that’s something that has been really useful to me in my adult life, especially when things are so hard around here, because you don’t always have money to do fun stuff. If you don’t have money, it’s okay, because you can still have fun. I like to be at home, honestly. I have four cats and two dogs. I hang out with them a lot. I play a lot of video games. I read, I write a little. Any kind of art. I’m not a very well rounded artist yet, but I’m trying to get there. [I do a] lot of introverted stuff.

[I want my legacy to be] Happiness. I want my kids to be happy. I want them to be content here.”

Hillbilly Highway

Folks, This morning’s post is a little different than what you are accustomed to. In this post we want to tell you a story about a photograph… A collaboration between musician, Ron Short and photographer, Malcolm J. Wilson (Co-Written by Ron Short, Jennifer Molley Wilson & Malcolm J. Wilson): 

The culture of Appalachia was carried through the mountains on the shoulders of collaboration. A hand needed, a hand extended. Whether it was help building a homestead, help storing away a winter’s worth of food from the peak of the gardening season, the passing of wrenches between shade tree mechanics on a Sunday afternoon, or the wisdom of the matriarchs, handing down cures for a colicky baby, Appalachians have always found that many hands make light work.

Collaboration is a tradition that has never waned in these mountains, especially anywhere artists may gather. So today, we want to share a very special recent collaboration with our community.

This one between a musician with a message, and a photographer who lets the eyes interpret what the musical notes carry to the ears.

The result was a photograph for a CD cover for Ron Short and the Possum Playboys newest release, “Hillbilly Highway.” Here is what the photograph was meant to represent: 

“I am the hands of a working man. In the lines and cracks and callouses there is a roadmap of a life. 

I have grubbed new-ground with a mattock and axe and I have plowed, planted and harvested the corn for my livestock and to grind the meal to feed my family.

I have planted many gardens and grown the food that we canned, dried and froze from the bounty of nature.

I dug the graves on the mountaintop to lay my kin people down to rest, and I have lowered them into the earth with a fervent hand-clasped prayer that I might see them someday, in a land better than this.

I slaughtered the animals that we ate, always with a deep sadness for I had cared for and nourished them with these same hands that now took their lives.

I held the gun my country gave me. I fired, not in anger, at another man. I held the flag that they gave me when another man fired a gun his country gave him, at my son. I don’t know if it was in anger or not, but death ends all anger and hate except for the living. I do not hate the man who fired the gun thrust into his hands by the same people who thrust the gun into my son’s hands.

I have held and felt the un-chained energy of a strong woman’s body, and marveled at the gifts she offered to me with passion and love! I have borne calves and, pigs and pups and kits but I could not hold back the tears that flowed when that little baby boy squirmed into my palms. When he held my finger and walked with me for the first time, I shook with the overwhelming desire to fall to my knees and thank God for this gift and for the woman who birthed him.

I have been soiled and stained with the dust of the earth, oil and grime from the machinery that rules this world and and the filth of hard labor from whatever menial dirty-work that a part of working hands could find! And I have fought the urge to strangle the men who treat working people as tools.

I am getting old, and you can see the wear and tear from a hard life of work. I am split and broken, calloused and permanently soiled. Though I am old, I still long for the touch of a woman, and pray each night to once again feel the strength of my darling companion who has gone on to find a home for us. A place where our boy will not not be torn and shattered, and will once again hold to me as we walk together.

These hands are the hands of Appalachia. They have caressed the mountains, they have been clenched in fury, they have been extended in friendship and peace. Someday, these hands will be folded across my chest for the final time, turning the roadmap of my soul toward my heart. They will be still, but the directions and paths I have chosen in life, will live on in the things these hands have touched.”