Janice Busic

“I’m talking about my memories of the Appalachian culture that I grew up with. I’m talking about a time that we didn’t have television and on Saturday nights, we all gathered around and listened to the radio. There weren’t a lot of things for people to do, so we used our imagination.” 

Janice Busic, Retired Teacher, Civil War Re-Enactor; Russell County, Virginia:

“I live in Honaker, Virginia. I grew up in Buchanan County, just across the mountain from Honaker. I was born during the World War II. When I was just a few months old, my father was called to serve. When I was two years old, I lived with my grandparents. 

I could tell you some stories about going to church with my Grandmother. We went to a baptizing one morning. It was cold, and I spent the night with my Mom. I woke up the next morning and smelled the coffee and sausage frying in her kitchen. I came downstairs. Mawmaw said, ‘We’re going to a baptizing today.’ I had been to baptizings before, but not when it was quite that cold, because there was a little snow on the ground. We dressed in our warmest clothes and walked down the road to the river where there was a pond of water.

Ice had formed around the river, around the rocks. I thought that might be a little interesting, but the most interesting thing was the lady who was going to be baptized that day. See, my Grandmother had a little country store and Post Office, and everyone gathered there. The talk had been going on for a week that Aunt Hettie had joined the church, and she was going to be baptized that Sunday, so the entire community turned out for that. They had walked from the tops of the mountains to down on the creeks. Everyone was there for the baptizing. 

Uncle Dave was one of the preachers. He was a tall, thin man. I don’t know who the other preacher was, but he was a little, short man. They went down to the river and they prayed. They sang a few songs, and they prayed some more. I figured they dreaded going out into that water. I got a little bored. I was probably five years old. They finally went out into the water, and Aunt Hettie came down. Aunt Hettie was quite a hefty lady. They got one on each elbow, and began to walk out into the water. Uncle Dave was preaching as he went, [with] his arm up in the air. They got out to where it was deep enough to baptize her, they turned around and Uncle Dave said a few words, and one on each side, they laid her back in the water. 

As soon as Aunt Hettie’s backside touched that water, she sprang forward and didn’t intend to go under. Uncle Dave sort of cleared his throat, and he said, ‘We’ll try this again.’ So they said a few words, and he raised his hand and they leaned Aunt Hettie back…the same thing. As soon as she touched the water, whew! She came right back up. I think about three times, and they finally got her under the water. Both arms were going like helicopters, and she took Uncle Dave under with her. Uncle Dave had a little goatee [and] all you could see out there was that little goatee sticking up out of the water. 

I looked over at Mawmaw, and she had a white handkerchief up over her face. Her shoulders were shaking. Mawmaw had a little bit of a belly, and her belly was just bouncing up and down, and I thought, ‘Oh she’s so upset, because they are having this accident out there.’ So I ran over [and] put my arms around her. I could look up under that white handkerchief, and she was laughing fit to kill. (Laughs) But that’s my story of the baptizing, and it is true.

I had two half-brothers. I lived in a community of all boys, so I really wanted to be like the boys. I couldn’t understand why Mom wouldn’t let me wear bibbed overalls like they did, and brogan shoes, but she didn’t. We grew up on a river. My brothers and I found an old half of a boat one time that had washed in on the river. We used to ride that boat. We’d pull it up the river and float down. My job was to bail, and the boys had two big sticks to guide it along the river. Mother never knew of that boat. 

My Mother was a schoolteacher. I was a breastfed baby, so I started school when I was born. I finished elementary school, going to a one-room school where there were seven grades. Mother was one of the teachers [and], and it was built, I understand, about 1920. My Grandfather had taught there for a brief time. Had two cloakrooms, one on each side, one for the boys and one for the girls. [There was a] big bucket with water and a dipper. In one of the cloakrooms, we had a big pot-bellied stove, Warm Morning, I believe it was, and the boys carried wood and coal for the stove. When it was really cold, we’d bring our desks up in a circle and sit around the stove to keep warm. 

It was always interesting in recess. We had toilets just like the cloakroom. One end of the playground had a boys’ toilet, and one end had a girls’. One time when we were out on the playground playing, my Dad’s old mule got loose [and] came running through the playground. We scattered in all directions [and] ran to the toilets. When the dust settled and the kids started coming out, my Mother used to tell, all the girls came out of the girls’ toilet, and all the boys and I came out of the boys’ toilet. (Laughs) It was closer, so I went to the closest one. 
My brothers were older than me so they got a bicycle several years before I did. Finally I got one, but I thought it was awfully unfair that they could ride that bicycle and I couldn’t reach the pedals. I thought they picked on me. There were things that they wanted to do, and they didn’t want a little sister following along after them. They used to chase me back to the house, try to make me stay there. I did, most of the time. We swam in the river, waded, fished, climbed trees, played Fox and Hound [and] swung from grapevines.

When I finished high school, I went to Virginia Intermont College in Bristol [Virginia]. I married after that and had three children.

I had started teaching before I got a degree, but then I went on and got my degree, and my Master’s after. I began teaching the first grade. Eventually, I taught lower elementary [and] third grade. Then, I taught Art, grades K-8. I taught Remedial Math and Remedial Reading, then I taught Psychology at the Community College. I was in Administration for a year, then I came back to the classroom and retired as Middle School math teacher. 

I hadn’t been teaching long, and there was a little boy that was a little different maybe, than some of the others. We were in school in what used to be an old dormitory, so my room had a little bathroom off it that we used. One day, that little boy went to the bathroom and came out. He’d left his pants in there, and came out in his underwear, and did a circle of the classroom, and right back into the bathroom. I went in after him and said, ‘you cannot come out again without your pants. Put those pants on.’ He said, ‘I have new underwear, and I wanted everybody to see it.’ 

I can’t imagine living for any length of time out of the mountains. I grew up, as I said, on the river where we had houses within sight, but not close. I do live in a very small town now, and that’s a little different. But it was a simpler way of life. I don’t think my parents even owned a key to their outside doors. 

I bought my first car, and paid less than $3,000 for it. I decided early on that if I wanted to buy things, I had to work and earn some money. 

My Grandmother had the little country store there, and I had heard about selling seeds. As a matter of fact, we had received something in the mail wanting me to buy seeds and sell them. I decided I could work out a deal with my Grandmother, and I could peddle the seeds going house to house, up and down the river. She could sell the seeds, and give me a commission. So she let me bag up a bag of seeds that she got in. I’d walk down to the next house, and the lady went through them. She had a list of seeds that she wanted, but I didn’t have any of those seeds, so I had to go back to the store and get the seeds she wanted, and go back. I went on to the next house, same thing. I decided that I spent more in shoe leather than I’d made, so that ended my first employment. 

I’m talking about my memories of the Appalachian culture that I grew up with. I’m talking about a time that we didn’t have television, and on Saturday nights, we all gathered around and listened to the radio. There weren’t a lot of things for people to do, so we used our imagination. The Appalachian people are some of the most innovative people on earth. We made do with what we had. We didn’t buy a lot of things. We grew what we needed on the farm, and most people worked hard, but they played hard, too. 

When I first went to Intermont College, of course, Bristol’s not that far, but it was a different culture. The things that I grew up taking for granted, I began to think about while I was there. For example, in the fall I would think, ‘I wonder if I was at home, if I could go outside and smell wood smoke burning?’ I couldn’t do that in college. I would wonder in the spring, ‘I wonder if they are planting tobacco seed now, if they’ve made their tobacco beds? Have they put out the first lettuce bed?’ And it was different. Then there was an appreciation when I went back, of just seeing that I could go out on the front porch and look at the mountains and the green hills.

I think television, the media, has promoted the stereotypical hillbilly with no teeth, who sits on the front porch, has his hound dog under his feet, with his jar of shine beside him. [That] fits what the television or movie industry thinks Appalachia’s like, [but] the Appalachia I grew up in is nothing like that.

The truth of Appalachia as I knew it growing up has changed. I’m not sure that it’s all good, although there’s certainly been improvements. Everyone has a car now that they didn’t when I was growing up. Children need to be watched closer now. When I was growing up, that didn’t happen. A child could leave in the morning and a mother knew the child would be safe, unless they fell and got hurt, or went in the river. Usually, if they were at the neighbor’s house, the mama there watched that child as close as the others. I figure that’s lost now. 

The convenience now is different. It’s nothing now to drive to Bristol, Bluefield, or Johnson City to go shopping. That didn’t happen when I was growing up. My Grandmother’s store carried bolts of material. If someone needed a new dress, they came up and bought two yards of ‘Dan River’ and made a dress. Sometimes, children’s dresses, especially play dresses and things to wear to school, were made from the feed sacks, and then a better dress for church. 

(The future of the region) In the way that it’s changed in the last twenty years, I expect the population may be greater. I expect that there will be more technology, cellphones. I watched telephones come into the community. I remember the first electricity that came into the community. I remember the first refrigerator that we had. That’s been more than twenty years happening though. 

The thing that concerns me about Appalachia now, is fewer opportunities for employment. people don’t work the farms now to make a living. They can’t make a living from a small farm now, and there’s fewer and fewer opportunities for them to have employment. There is. I have watched though, people do leave the area to get a job, those that have the means to do so. Quite often they come back [for] the love of the hills, the love of the memories from childhood, and the search for what they had then. 

Probably one of the hardest times in my life was when my sons were in Iraq. I have two sons, and they were both there at the same time. That was awfully hard. This is one of the new things that has happened in my lifetime; I could keep in touch with them by calling and by internet, so I did hear from them a lot more often than my Mother heard from my Father when he was in World War II. 

One son was Commander of a truck convoy [and] the other flew drones. The older son called me and said, ‘I’m on the base where Jonathan is. How can I find him?’ While I was on the phone with one son, I got on the Internet with the other and helped them connect. It was wonderful, and it was so rewarding to know that they’d both been there all that time, but hadn’t seen each other and were able to have a short visit. They both came back okay. Both sons are different, but they came back. When my oldest son left, my husband said, ‘You’ll never see your boy again. When he comes back he’ll be a man.’ And he was.

There were a lot of happy times. The birth of my children. There’s nothing like holding a new baby in your arms. Grandchildren. My younger son was stationed in Hawaii when his child was born. At just seconds before the birth, he called me and held the phone down so I heard her first cry when she was in Hawaii.

(The Importance of history) I always say, In order to know where you are going, or even where you are now, you have to know where you’ve been.’ If you were plunked down in the middle of a road in Wyoming [and] you had no idea how you got there, would you know where to go? Would you know what direction to go in? You have to know what’s behind you 

I have [been a Civil War re-enactor] probably ten years. I haven’t always done Mary Custis Lee. The first character I did was Clara Barton. I’m too old to do Clara Barton now. Then I did Molly Tynes. Molly Tynes is a local heroine, and I’m much too old to be Molly Tynes now. But really, this is my favorite character. I almost feel like I become a part of Mary Custis Lee. People didn’t know her history. They know of General Lee, but they didn’t know how she contributed to history, and what an important impact she had.

There was a true, undying love between General Lee and Mary. I read a book early on called, The Softer Side of Lee. That’s how I chose what I portray. Everyone knows about the General. Everyone knows the facts of Arlington. But you don’t often hear about the love they shared. How they raised their daughters. The adoration that their daughters had for their father. How their older son stepped up when General Lee died, and took over the Presidency of Washington College. It became his mission in life to take care of his mother and his sisters. You don’t hear those things.“

Tim Delay

“I’ve been doing carpentry work now for over thirty years. I was wanting to go in my Dad’s footsteps, and I asked him to help me get a job in the coal mines. He said, ‘Son, if you can stay out in the sunshine, that’s where you need to be.’”

Tim Delay, Carpenter and Civil War Re-enactor; Kesler’s Cross Lanes, Summersville, West Virginia:

“My Mom was a stay-at-home mom. She raised three kids, my two older brothers and me. My Dad was a coal miner, worked in the mines for forty-one years. We didn’t have a lot, but they kept a roof over our heads, and kept us fed, and kept us clothed, and they’re good Christian people. 

[As a kid, it was] a pretty simple life. Working in the garden [was] hard work and we had fun. We had a swimming hole in Meadow Creek, and we’d go down there after we got done with the garden, and swim and jump off ropes and trees, and splash around in the water a little bit and cool off. And just do what any other typical kid would do, and get in trouble. Aggravate your in-laws and your neighbors. Have crabapple fights. 

We didn’t have much extra money or anything, so what toys we had we most usually made them. [We’d] make little go-carts that we would push up the hill and ride down, and we’d get in crabapple fights, horse, cow biscuits fights all the time with the neighbor kids and stuff, and that was pretty interesting. You got to find the right horse biscuit to do any good. (Laughs) We usually put them on the end of a stick and hurled them. You could get a little bit farther [and] you didn’t have to get a grip on them because some of them was kind of juicy inside. (Laughs) We used them for our hand grenades when we played war.

My Granddad was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. [He] was born on Dolly River, I think in 18 and 84, I believe, to a tribe of Indians that migrated. They weren’t really Cherokee. They were kin to the Cherokees, and when they become civil, they took on the last name of Johnson. My Grandma, her mom was a full-blooded Blackfoot, so she had some Indian in her, too. I didn’t really know they were Native Americans until I got a little older. But then when I got in school, and learned about history, and learned what the U.S. government done to the native people, it really saddened me that they just took, and took, and took, and didn’t give anything back to the Native Americans. 

[I learned a few Native American ways] I can build a fire when it’s raining, and camp. I know how to stay dry in the winter, how to fish, how to make fishhooks, and stuff like that.

[My grandparents] worked on the farm, and Granddaddy served in the military, both bad wars, World War I and World War II, [where] the German’s shot him right down through the top of his helmet. He was shell-shocked. It didn’t kill him or anything, but we got his helmet, and it’s a big, old, deep cone shape. He had a little problem with that. He got hooked on morphine. But now, he was a good granddaddy. He taught me how to make wooden shingles for roofs. Him and me played croquet just about every evening after I got home from school. 

He taught me how to shuck corn, and oats, to stack oats after you take a scythe with a basket, make the shock and set them out in the field. He done everything by hand because that’s all he had. He had two oxen, and Buck and Berry was their names. They pulled plows, and the farm equipment, and everything, and when I was real little I used to ride on them. 

They was good people, good grandparents.

I didn’t know my grandparents on my Dad’s side. He was a coal miner, so they jumped around a lot [from] coal camp to coal camp. One day, they just got tired and left. They left the family. My Mom said when I was born, he did see me two or three times, and just loved me to death. Of course, I was so little, I can’t remember. I don’t know much about them, but now I did have three ancestors in the Civil War that was Delays. My Great-Great-Grandpa William T. Delay was a private in the 18th Virginia Company H Cavalry, him and his brother, Charles. And their other brother was a Second Lieutenant in the 25th Virginia Infantry Company H, and he was killed in Sharpsburg in the war.

High school was always the same part of your life, going to school and meeting new friends, and then your old friends that you’d gone to school together with from the 1st grade. I played football and wrestled in high school. So you know, I just was like any other typical kid going to school.

I went in business for myself mowing yards, and this probably was before I graduated. I started mowing people’s yards in the community, and bought my first vehicle like that. Then after high school, I went to work for my uncle doing carpentry work. He taught me the trade of carpentry, and I been doing that ever since. 

I’ve been doing carpentry work now for over thirty years. I was wanting to go in my Dad’s footsteps, and I asked him to help me get a job in the coal mines. He said, ‘Son, if you can stay out in the sunshine, that’s where you need to be. You don’t need to be underneath the ground, in a hole in the ground.’ He worked for a pretty good company. They had a bathhouse so I didn’t really see him all blackened, and coal dust, and stuff, until I got a little older and started driving, and sometimes I’d go over yonder and pick him up, if the old vehicle wasn’t going to start. So I seen him dirty [then]. He been in a couple little rock falls [in the mines], but nothing major. He was always in equipment in the cages, and that protected him a little bit. He did have a heart attack in the mines in later years, but they got him out and to the hospital. He was all right then, and both of [my parents are] still living. You might as well say [they are] eighty-three, both of them. They’re about a year apart, but they’re the same age about three or four months out of the year. 

I’ve run spads [and worked] some underground for coalmines surveying for entryways and stuff, mostly at night shift. Where nobody was working in there, you’d here that old mountain a-moaning and a-groaning, and you’d think it’s going to fall in just anytime. Now, when the equipment’s running, you can’t hear anything like that. Dad took me in the mines several times, and showed me where he worked, and what he done in the mines. He said, ‘We’ll go up to the Number 2 belt head.’ We got on the little Charlie on tracks, and he told me to keep my head down. Of course, I was young, probably around thirteen or fourteen, and you don’t listen very good when you’re that age. I kept on inching my head up, and directly a roof bolt caught me in the head. (Laughs) He said, ‘And now, next time you’ll keep your head down, won’t you?’ Oh yeah, it smarted a little bit. 

When we were growing up we took Grandma and Granddad to Florida for the winter to get them out of the snow, and out of the cold weather. I liked other parts of the country [and] I’d visit ever state in the union, if I could but, West Virginia always been home. [I] always looked forward to the mountains after I come out of Florida and Georgia, wanting to see them again. It’s just like getting a big bowl of ice cream or something, you know? It’s a sight. I mean, you’re driving through the plains, and you just start seeing these little hills rolling up, going toward the sky, and the farther you go, the better they get.

When I was growing up, neighbors helped neighbors, and you don’t see that much anymore. The little group of friends that I got, we still help each other. If they need a little building built, or shed, or the house roofed, we all gang up and have a big cookout and do it. You don’t really see that in any other part of the country. People call us mountain people, or hillbillies, or whatever, and then they kind of down us sometimes. I don’t like that, because we’re just as smart as anybody else in the nation. And we live off the woods, and we live off the land.

It makes me mad. To me, they’re just showing their ignorance because they don’t learn about who we are and what kind of people we are. We’re the same people that they are. You know, just because I live in the mountains, and y’all live in the deserts or in The Rocky Mountains, or California, or wherever, we’re the same bunch of people, and when the nation gets in trouble we all pull together. There were more people from West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee went to fight in all the wars we had, and more of them came back because we knew how to shoot, how to live.

I’m a hillbilly. The greatest race of people on the earth. (Laughs out loud.) 

When my grandparents died [was one on my hardest times]. My family is a pretty healthy family, and I was in high school when they died. They were the closest people to me in our family that died. I’d say that probably was the first hardest time, because I was always, always over there. We lived close by them, and I was there every evening helping them do stuff.

[My happiest time was] probably when I graduated from high school. (Laughs) Then I didn’t have to get up early in the morning any more. 

[Civil War re-enactment) I live close to the Carnifex Ferry State Park Battlefield, and I had been going out yonder and watching them do re-enactments. This one year, I decided to see if I couldn’t join in on them. Well, I got the bug. It’s a pretty good feeling when you aim a gun at somebody legally, pull the trigger and don’t get in trouble for it unless you do something stupid. They’re real guns, and we shoot black powder. I’ve been in it now for ten years. I’m the Captain of the 36th Virginia Company A. 

We try and keep the history up so it won’t repeat itself. A lot of the teachers now don’t teach about the history of the Civil War, but it’s our history of America. When they were fighting the Civil War, each state was their own country, more or less. The people that lived in the states, that was their country. The country of Virginia. The country of North Carolina. The country of South Carolina. The country of New York. The country of Pennsylvania. That was their states, but it was their country. They believed in their states. 

We see a lot of [interest by young people]. We’ll be cooking over an open fire, and they come up and ask us if the fire is real. And the food we got on the fire is it real? Do we sleep in tents, and sleep on the ground? Yes, we do. We try to portray it as close as we can. Now, we didn’t live back then and the only thing we got is the history in the books. When I was younger, there were still people that lived during the Civil War, and they taught us what they done, and how they’d do it. And so we can’t repeat exactly what they done back then, but we can get awfully close. Our clothes and everything as period correct as we can.

[I want to be remembered as] a good, honest person. I try not to lie to anybody, to do the right thing [and] treat people right.”

Kenneth Colinger

“[Kudzu]…is an invasive vine that when you cut it down, two days later it’s took over three times as much. I relate a lot of life around here to kudzu. When you get in the clear, you get that overwhelming feeling that the overlapping is coming, always the overshadowing coming back over you.”

Kenneth Colinger, Age 22, Property Maintenance, Production Crew Member, Higher Ground: Loyall, Kentucky:

"Most of my friends and everything, we came from low-income families. [I grew up with] a sense of getting away from things when you could, and having a sense of when to buckle down, even as a kid. 

My Dad dropped out of high school more than halfway through his senior year in high so he could go to work. He was married at eighteen years old, and he’s worked all his life. He has been a truck driver pretty much all of his life; he’s driven block trucks, been over the road, and hauled coal, scrap metal, and concrete.

We were real poor when I was growing up, way below the poverty line, and he was one of the biggest inspirations for me, because he instilled in me the will and work ethic to always make sure you can provide for your loved ones. I watched him struggle a whole lot, but we always had anything we ever wanted because of him. He’s one of my favorite examples of what a good, strong Appalachian man is, hardworking and salt of the earth. 

We were always outdoors; fishing, and being in the mountains. I was outside all the time [as a kid] playing basketball, football, hide and seek and fox and the hound.

My mother is a sweet lady. Much [like dad], she’s always worked. She spent about ten years as a stay-at-home mom. A lot of the compassion I feel for the people around here, and seeing the good in people, I get from my Mom. 

High school is where I discovered music and playing guitar. I don’t remember too much, just trying to figure myself out and get through, but I do remember high school being a very difficult time of uncertainty, not knowing if I was going to leave here, or stay. 

One thing [dad and I] never really connected on was music, but as I got older, we both discovered we liked much of the same type of music, so that was something we could bond through. He connected a lot with the things I was talking about. He had never thought that I’ve had to go through much of the same things that he’s lived through.

I have two brothers. My oldest brother has a different dad than me, and my middle brother, Jonathan, is actually how I got into music. Jon lives in Corbin now, and works at a factory. [He had to move] because of not being able to find work in the coal industry and things here. My oldest brother, Aaron lives here. Jonathan, who lives in Corbin, we pick quite a bit. I think that for him that’s something that lets him stay connected to this place, getting to come and play music. 

Music is huge in Appalachian culture. From looking back through history, that’s all I’ve ever known about Appalachia, is music and arts. It’s always been the voice for Appalachians to get their feelings out. It can be any [style of music]. People always think folk music, Americana. I mean, I play hard rock metal music, too, and that’s just as Appalachian as it gets. It’s not about the music, it’s more about what you’re talking about; hardship, finding ways to move on, and poverty is a big one. 

I grew up listening to old-timey Americana, Hank Williams and folk music. Doc Watson was always my favorite. I started out playing metal music, because it helped get a lot of emotion out. But, when I started singing and playing folk music, it helped me find myself, and to express myself. I’m more self-taught than anything. My brother played a little bit of guitar when he was [younger] and my Papaw was a banjo player. I never got to meet him, but from what my Mamaw says, he’s one of the best she’s ever heard, and when she watches me play, she sees a lot of him in me. (Laughs)

I’m currently playing with Adam and Rick Brock, Greg Hollins, and Nick Cornett, and we’re known as the Kudzu Killers. From my understanding, I reckon that kudzu comes from Asia. All I know is that it’s an invasive vine that when you cut it down, two days later it’s took over three times as much. I relate a lot of life around here to kudzu. When you get in the clear, you get that overwhelming feeling that the overlapping is coming, always the overshadowing coming back over you. Kudzu Killers is a very good title for it. None of us are drug users or anything, but we do a lot of talk about drugs and the hardships. We do a lot of cover music and things, but most of it is just talking about things from here.

Just the genuine feeling you get from everyone [makes this area special]. It feels like nobody around here has anything to hide. Everyone’s just all about brotherly love. I know for me growing up around here, with people from Appalachia I feel like I can always go up to them, and always have a connection with them. If I go somewhere else, it’s just something you lose. There’s a sense of family. I was talking to someone the other day about what it is that has kept me here. You go away for months and months at a time, and there’s nothing like the secure feeling of just being in these mountains. [I plan on living here my whole life] but even if have to leave, I plan on coming back. 

I like to say that I am typical hill folk. I love being in the mountains. I love being outdoors. I love the culture. 

Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met in this world are from Appalachia. And [sometimes outsiders] think that the ways that we’ve lived on are just backward. In reality, we’re just as progressive as most people. 

[Stereotypes] can be accurate to an extent, with maybe accents and things, but from the inside looking out, a lot of things I see is people thinking that we’re lazy and we don’t want to work for anything. Most of the people I’ve met around here are good, salt of the earth people who would give you the shirt off their back. They’re hard working, and would do anything to make a living, and to stay in their home.

(Appalachian ingenuity) Just from my own experience working in the coal industry, [it seems like] everybody does ten jobs in one, and there’s always a way to find something to fix, if you don’t have the things to fix it. Some of the most ingenuous people I’ve ever met are Appalachian. On a coal belt line one time, there was a break. The belt line is what runs your coal from inside of a mine. For example, it brings it from the inside after the miners cut it up, to the outside and dumps it in a pile. I remember we used the teeth from a roll of cable that we had to secure the belt back together, just to keep it running to feed what was left running out on it. 

I don’t think coal will come back. I worked in the coalmine industry for the past two and a half, three years, and I’ve been there first hand. A lot of people do believe that it will come back, but just with the regulations and the times we’re living in, I think the down swing is the down swing…that it’s done it in this time. We have to find a way to attract in industry and find people that’s not familiar with the culture, and show them how hard working we are, and that we’re willing to stay here and fight for what we have, if we had the means to. 

A factory is not the answer. We’ve got to find other means. I think arts are a great way to start [as well as] conventions, music venues and things like that. That will help local businesses and restaurants. You start small, and grow and build, and attract more people.

I was talking to a young person yesterday, and two out of four kids, have the sentiment of, ‘I want to leave.’ There are parents that have been part of the coal industry, and have seen the swing down. They don’t want to see their kids stay here, and struggle like they’ve had to struggle. 

The problem with working in the coal industry [is the] big swing down and getting laid off, not having money to go to school, and not really having means to get a job around here; just feeling stuck, and not knowing where to go and what to do. I’m hoping that within the next year, I can get back to college]. I’m wanting to do something environmental. I love being outdoors and being out in the woods and I would love to contribute to helping out the outdoors and the mountains.

(Happiest times) Probably working with Robert Gipe at Southeast Community College, and getting to do things with Appalachia, and talk to people about what our ideas are to help. Higher Ground is in its twelfth year. There have been five productions, and community members come together telling different stories from the past, the present, and even what might be the future. How we can move on, stay here, be successful, and make this a place worth staying. I’ve been involved with two, now. 

The fourth one was the first one I was a part of, and it was a lot about feeling lost in your home, and how you find your way out, and how your find yourself. We did interviews with cast and audience members afterwards. I noticed it made people realize that young people were interested in talking about change, and finding ways and reasons to want to stay. [Audiences have] been a steady mix of everyone. Every topic we’ve had has struck nerves with people. 

One of my favorite songs I’ve written, I’ve got to be honest, is the title track for the last play we did, ‘Find a Way.’ I’ve never really written something thinking what a young person would want to say. For me, that was a big thing. It talks about the fear that you feel when you’re growing up here, and not really knowing how your future will turn out after high school…if you’re going to have to go away or come back. To an extent, I didn’t have to think much about it, because I just let the emotion come out from growing up around here. 

My biggest fears are seeing the economy not pick back up and just seeing the down swing keep on going. I hope that in ten, twenty years, with the enthusiasm that I’ve seen in the young people, [this area] is back to its booming ways, that businesses are opening back up and the economy’s strengthening. 

I just want to be able to touch at least one person, and let them know that, ‘You can stay here, and make your dreams come true.’ So, if my legacy is just to help one person, one young person stay here, that’s [great].”

Ann W. Olson

“If you watch Fox News you think one way, if you listen to National Public Radio you think another way, and that doesn’t need to be. You need a place where you can explore ideas, and not just be told what to think. I think Appalachians need to say, ‘where I live is a powerful place.’” 

Ann W. Olson, Photographer; Mauk Ridge, Elliott County, Kentucky:

“I’m a photographer, [but] only since the middle nineties. I started out by doing a national children’s book, so I started at the top and then I had to figure out how to be a photographer from that. I live in a rural area, so one is flexible sometimes. I’ve worked at the bookstore, I’ve worked on public relations for the public radio station, I’ve worked at the hospital, and I’ve taught French at the University.

I was born in Bronxville, New York, outside of New York City. I did a work camp when I was eighteen, with the Quakers in Wolfe County. I loved it in Kentucky, and then I came back after college to be in the War on Poverty. I was a VISTA volunteer, and I lived across the road from where I live now. I left for a few years, and then we came back. I was married then, and we bought a farm, and that’s where we live. 

[I joined the War on Poverty in] ’66, so it was in the beginning. It was pretty open-ended, and you could do a lot more community organizing then than you can now. The community I was with was applying to the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to start a Head Start Program, so I worked with them helping get that ready. Then, we all bundled into a car and we drove up and presented it to the OEO. It was hilarious because the people I was with weren’t used to seeing black people, so the Office of OEO had lots of black people. They were staring at them, and then a couple of people in my group were chewing tobacco. And the other people in the OEO were staring at them. 

But we got our grant, so whatever works, I say. [It was] culture clash, (Laughs) but that was the whole idea; that people didn’t feel isolated, and that they could speak up for what they needed. I was with a group called the Appalachian Volunteers, which had some publicity over the years for being very [much] activists.

We worked with the students at Morehead State University to go out on the weekends and help fix up a school or something like that. Some of the counties didn’t have their schools consolidated yet, so they had one-room schools or two-room schools. A lot of it was talking to people. You worked a lot for not much money, but they did pay your gas, and they paid your health insurance so who needs money? The main thing was to help people articulate what it is they wanted, and what they were concerned about, or what they cared about, where they wanted to put their energies; to make it as little top-down as you could.

(What can be done to stimulate the Appalachian economy?) More schooling is an option, a better option now, even though they could do a lot of work to have a higher bar for them for education, because these kids are smart. I think there’s been more economic development, also, but not enough. I’m not exactly in coal country, so I’m not talking coal. Coal country needed to have more diversity from the get-go, because what’s happening now is nothing to do with anybody, except they’ve run out of coal. 

Poverty is still a defining aspect of people’s lives, and without stronger education, it’s not going to change as much as it should. [We need] a stronger support of education, and I find that kids end up wasting a lot of time in school. They’re not pushed because they don’t see possibilities for themselves.

It would sure help if the mountains stayed in place, and they didn’t get shaved off, and people had opportunities to work closer to home, and not have to leave. I don’t have all the answers, but I think that the beauty of the place is so much an integral part of what it is, but people take it for granted. That’s been my experience anyway. 

There’s people who have gone on to do this work in other places, but I just had a gut love for Eastern Kentucky. I like that Appalachia is a subculture. We have ninety acres, and at some point it was mostly cleared. People cleared it with a horse or whatever, and it’s really awesome how hard people have worked. They’ve put food up, and all those things, and yet they were shunned. I like being out of the mainstream. Now with television people are more equal. 

But one thing I see is that between television and air conditioning, people don’t sit out on their porch, and visit like they used to in the summer. They’d sit out and you could stop by and talk, and that doesn’t happen like it used to. On the ridge where I live, I’m probably the only one who doesn’t have other family members nearby, so I’m just adopted by one of the families. That works out fine, and yet I find family very important. I think it’s an important aspect of life in Appalachia. I was a little distressed. I had some teenagers come help me recently, and I said, ‘Aren’t the dogwood trees beautiful this year?’ And one of them said, ‘Which ones are the dogwoods?’ I was stunned. I said, ‘Do you all realize that you live in one of the most beautiful places in the nation?’ Of course, they had no idea. They take it for granted, and so they now know what a dogwood tree is. 

I don’t want to live anywhere else except here, and yet I do have family in New England. I’m recently divorced, but my husband had family in California. My father remarried somebody in England, so he lived in England. Right now, my stepmother is the only one still living. So I have a unique [family dynamic], but this is my place. 

I had a training with Appalachian Volunteers for VISTA, and there were twenty-five in our group that were trained for three weeks. At the end of the three weeks, the group here got to choose five of the people they wanted to work with them. I was one of the ones they wanted, because a lot of people don’t get it, that poor people can decide what they think, what they want, and work on that. That was back in the Sixties. There was still a lot of, ‘well, these people are poor, so they must not know anything.’ That’s a very big assumption. So, in a way, I chose the region. I had done a work camp in high school here, so I knew I liked the region. I was thinking of doing something with literacy. I didn’t know anything about Community Action, until after my training. 

(Stereotypes) My son was nine months old when we moved down here, my daughter was born here. They’ve been out in the world. They have a flexible life, being very comfortable here and being comfortable other places. But when they went away to school, they got kidded for being barefoot. ‘Are you barefoot?’ and lots of stereotypes about Kentucky, and it made them very upset because they knew it wasn’t true, and number two, it wasn’t really true for them. 

My son, for example, went on to clerk at the Supreme Court. He uses his Kentucky experience now to being able to talk to all kinds of people of all ages, and being comfortable talking to people. He’s a trial lawyer. For a long time, he had to be one to tell people to quit stereotyping Kentucky, and I’m sure he still gets it sometime. And my daughter, also, but she’s moving back here [to] buy the farm from us. They want to live a little more off the grid, and live where they can explore the beauty and the water. She’s totally addicted to our waterfalls.

The truth about Appalachia is connected to a truth about America, which is that we are easily caught up in thinking like other people think. We don’t think for ourselves, so if we hear opinions, or somebody in church tells you to believe something, or someone in school doesn’t want you to think about something, you don’t use your brain. Thinking skills are just as valuable here, as they are out in other places. People are afraid to be a little different, afraid to think for themselves. As an artist, as a photographer, I know that if people don’t think somebody else approves your work, they’re scared to make an opinion themselves. They want approval. 

I’m very prone to thinking it’s the media [and there] is a little bit of mind control involved. If you watch Fox News you think one way, if you listen to National Public Radio you think another way, and that doesn’t need to be. You need a place where you can explore ideas, and not just be told what to think. I think Appalachians need to say, ‘where I live is a powerful place.’ There are those people who are doing that, but a lot of people want to do it the way it’s always been done, and that’s another part of the problem anywhere in society.

My photography, I think, happened because of where I live. I was fifty-five before I started, and I worked with George Ella Lyon, who is currently the Poet Laureate of Kentucky. She had a book that a New York editor wanted me to illustrate with nature photography. For a six thousand dollar advance, I got to go out in the woods, sweat, sweat, sweat [and] in four months, come up with thirty-five pictures for this book. I learned a lot. I learned how to use a tripod. I learned to use Velvia film. I would get a really good picture, then I’d have to make sure all the pictures were equally good, and I did it! I did it, and I loved it, because I love working by myself. I find that I have an eye, which is easier to have to start with, than to learn how to do it. That’s what’s gotten me over all the technical stuff that I might not still know. 

I have a couple of covers that I’m really proud of for Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry is a hoot. I really appreciate knowing him, because I met him when a bunch of writers and artists got together to speak up against mountaintop removal mining. The most recent one is on his collected Sabbath Day poems. It’s called ‘This Day.’ It’s a picture of a creek, but the designer wanted a brownish type photo. So it has a tree like an evergreen tree, not evergreen, but one of the ones that doesn’t lose its leaves, in the front. The California publisher wanted to put some kind of California picture on the front. I wrote them, and said, ‘the California pictures may work well for you all out there, but it’s not at all Wendell Berry.’ 

I'm in a video by Steve Middleton about death and dying in Appalachia, because this family that I’m sort of adopted by, has had three very unusual funerals and burials. They wanted me to film the burials. I have done that, because I know the people and I’m comfortable and it’s interesting to me. They seemed to appreciate it. The first [funeral] was the grandfather, and they put the casket into a cart they could pull the last two miles before the cemetery. They pulled the horse-drawn cart because he loved horses, and his grandson loved horses. The second one was the grandson of one of the sons of this man who died, and he lives up in Fleming County. He was a bulldozer operator, so they transferred his casket to his bulldozer and pulled it up this hill, because that’s what he loved. But I, it was very cold that day and snowing, and I only took the part where they transferred him across, because I just couldn’t get stuck up on the mountain. The third one had to do with horses again, because it was a friend of this grandson’s, who had been sort of like a father to him. He loved horses, so they did a similar thing pulling the hearse, but it wasn’t on a back road, it was on the main road.

I have a blog that I do weekly about Appalachia and photography. It’s called The Sideway Views, but if you Google Ann W. Olson you get all my stuff. 

[I would like people to remember] that I thought for myself, I believed in myself, and I believed that other people have interesting ideas. I don’t have to agree with them, but I can listen to them, and we can work together.”