Further Reading — Chapter 8: Religion, Community, and Culture in Early Appalachia

Essential Readings

Appalachian Religion

  • McCauley, Deborah Vansau. Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. The most comprehensive scholarly history of religion in Appalachia, tracing the development of mountain religious traditions from the frontier period through the twentieth century. McCauley argues that Appalachian religion is a distinct tradition — not simply a backwater version of mainstream Protestantism — with its own theological character, worship practices, and social functions. Essential reading for understanding the Baptist and Methodist foundations described in this chapter.

  • Boles, John B. The Great Revival: Beginnings of the Bible Belt. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972. A classic study of the Second Great Awakening in the southern and western frontier, including detailed analysis of the camp meeting movement and the Cane Ridge Revival. Boles situates the camp meetings within the broader context of American evangelical Protestantism and traces their long-term consequences for southern religious culture.

  • Conkin, Paul K. Cane Ridge: America's Pentecost. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. The definitive scholarly account of the Cane Ridge Revival of 1801. Conkin reconstructs the event in meticulous detail, examines its theological and social contexts, and traces its consequences for American religion — including the birth of the Restoration Movement and the establishment of the camp meeting as an institution.

  • Dorgan, Howard. Giving Glory to God in Appalachia: Worship Practices of Six Baptist Subdenominations. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987. A detailed ethnographic study of Baptist worship practices in Appalachia, including the Primitive Baptists, Regular Baptists, Old Regular Baptists, and other subdenominations that trace their origins to the frontier period. Dorgan's careful descriptions of worship services, preaching styles, and congregational life illuminate the living legacy of the traditions described in this chapter.

  • Wigger, John H. Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. An excellent study of early Methodism in America that places the circuit rider system and the camp meeting movement in the context of American democratic culture. Wigger shows how Methodism's organizational innovations — circuit riding, class meetings, lay leadership — made it uniquely effective on the frontier.

The Ballad Tradition and Folk Music

  • Sharp, Cecil J., and Maud Karpeles. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. London: Oxford University Press, 1932 (expanded edition). The foundational collection of Appalachian folk songs, gathered by Sharp during his field trips to the mountains between 1916 and 1918. While Sharp's framing of the tradition has been rightly criticized (see Whisnant, below), the collection itself remains indispensable — a treasury of songs, tunes, and notes about the singers who performed them.

  • Ritchie, Jean. Singing Family of the Cumberlands. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. A memoir by one of the great tradition bearers of Appalachian folk music. Jean Ritchie grew up in a large family in Viper, Kentucky, where singing was as natural as breathing, and her account of that musical upbringing is both a personal narrative and a portrait of the ballad tradition from inside. Beautifully written and deeply informative.

  • Combs, Josiah H. Folk-Songs of the Southern United States (Folk-Songs du Midi des États-Unis). Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967 (originally published in French, 1925). An important early collection of Appalachian folk songs by a scholar who was himself a native of eastern Kentucky. Combs's insider perspective gives his collection a depth of context that some outside collectors lacked.

  • Whisnant, David E. All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. A critical examination of the folk song collectors and settlement school workers who "discovered" and promoted Appalachian folk culture in the early twentieth century. Whisnant argues that these well-intentioned outsiders often distorted the traditions they documented, imposing their own aesthetic preferences and cultural agendas on a living culture. Essential reading for understanding the politics of ballad collection.

  • Bronson, Bertrand Harris. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. 4 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–1972. The monumental companion to Francis James Child's text collection, providing the melodies — gathered from field collections across the English-speaking world, including Appalachia — that Child himself did not include. For serious students of the ballad tradition, Bronson's work is indispensable.

Folk Culture, Material Culture, and Community Life

  • Roberts, Leonard. Sang Branch Settlers: Folksongs and Tales of a Kentucky Mountain Family. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974. A rich collection of songs, stories, and cultural practices from a single extended family in eastern Kentucky, demonstrating the depth and interconnectedness of the oral tradition within a kin network.

  • Jones, Loyal. Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. A sympathetic, insightful examination of religion and folk belief in Appalachian life, written by a scholar who grew up in the mountains. Jones explores the interrelation of faith, folk belief, community values, and daily life with sensitivity and depth.

  • Wigginton, Eliot, ed. The Foxfire Book. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972 (and subsequent volumes). The first of a landmark series of books compiled by high school students in Rabun County, Georgia, documenting traditional Appalachian practices including quilting, food preservation, herbal medicine, blacksmithing, and folk belief. While the Foxfire project is a twentieth-century phenomenon (see Chapter 30), the practices it documents are rooted in the frontier-era traditions described in this chapter.

  • Irwin, John Rice. Alex Stewart: Portrait of a Pioneer. West Chester, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 1985. A detailed portrait of traditional mountain life as remembered by an elderly east Tennessee man, including accounts of communal labor, folk medicine, religious practice, and material culture that illuminate the world described in this chapter.

Shape-Note Singing

  • Bealle, John. Public Worship, Private Faith: Sacred Harp and American Folksong. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. A scholarly study of the Sacred Harp singing tradition, tracing its origins in New England singing schools, its migration to the South, and its survival as a living communal practice. Bealle examines both the music itself and the social institutions — singing conventions, all-day singings, community networks — that sustain it.

  • Cobb, Buell E., Jr. The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978. An accessible introduction to shape-note singing that covers the history, the music, the singing conventions, and the culture of the tradition. A good starting point for readers unfamiliar with Sacred Harp.

Folk Medicine and Folk Belief

  • Cavender, Anthony. Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. The most comprehensive scholarly study of Appalachian folk medicine, covering herbal remedies, folk practitioners, the relationship between folk and professional medicine, and the cultural context of healing practices. Cavender draws on extensive fieldwork and historical sources to reconstruct the folk medical tradition described in this chapter.

  • Milnes, Gerald. Signs, Cures, and Witchery: German Appalachian Folklore. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. An important study of the German folk traditions that influenced Appalachian folk belief, including powwow (faith healing), moon signs, conjuring, and herbal medicine. Milnes demonstrates that the German contribution to Appalachian folk culture has been underappreciated and fills a significant gap in the scholarly literature.

Broader Context

Religion in Early America

  • Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. A landmark study of how American Christianity was transformed in the early republic by democratic impulses — the rejection of clerical authority, the rise of populist preachers, and the empowerment of ordinary believers. Hatch's framework is essential for understanding why the Baptists and Methodists succeeded on the Appalachian frontier while the established denominations faltered.

  • Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. A provocative study of religion in early America that challenges the conventional narrative of steady Christianization and reveals the persistence of folk belief, magic, and spiritual eclecticism alongside — and sometimes within — organized Christianity. Butler's work provides context for the "enchanted world" described in this chapter.

Oral Tradition and Folklore Studies

  • Abrahams, Roger D. Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. While focused on plantation culture rather than Appalachia, Abrahams's study of oral tradition in African American communities provides an important comparative perspective on how culture is created and transmitted in the absence of formal institutions.

Primary Source Collections and Archives

  • The Alan Lomax Archive / Association for Cultural Equity: culturalequity.org — Extensive field recordings of Appalachian singers, storytellers, and musicians, made from the 1930s through the 1990s. Available online with audio, photographs, and field notes.

  • Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: loc.gov/folklife — The national archive for American folklore, including the Archive of Folk Culture's vast collections of Appalachian field recordings, transcriptions, and related materials.

  • Berea College, Loyal Jones Appalachian Center: berea.edu/appalachian-center — Collections related to Appalachian culture, including folk music, oral history, and material culture.

  • Appalachian State University, W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection: A significant archive of Appalachian folk music recordings, ballad texts, and related materials from western North Carolina.

  • The Sacred Harp Publishing Company: sacredharpbremen.com — Resources related to Sacred Harp singing, including the current edition of The Sacred Harp and information about singing conventions.

  • Federal Writers' Project oral histories: Available through the Library of Congress American Memory project. Includes accounts from elderly informants in the 1930s who remembered — or whose parents remembered — the frontier-era cultural practices described in this chapter.