Part Six: Culture and Identity

In 1927, in a hat factory on State Street in Bristol, a city that straddles the Tennessee-Virginia line, a talent scout from the Victor Talking Machine Company set up a portable recording studio and changed American music forever. The Carter Family walked in and recorded "Bury Me Beneath the Weeping Willow." Jimmie Rodgers recorded "The Soldier's Sweetheart." What happened in that room — what scholars now call the Bristol Sessions, the "Big Bang" of country music — was the moment when centuries of Appalachian musical tradition met the technology of mass distribution. But the tradition did not begin in Bristol. It began on porches and in churches, in the field hollers of enslaved African Americans and the ballads carried across the Atlantic from Scotland and Ireland and England, in the banjo that came from West Africa and the fiddle that came from everywhere. The music was already old when the microphones arrived.

Culture is the part of Appalachian history that most people think they know. The banjo. The quilt. The hymn. The accent. And it is true that Appalachian culture is extraordinary — rich, layered, resilient, inventive, and deeply beautiful. But most of what the outside world thinks it knows about Appalachian culture is wrong, or incomplete, or frozen in a nostalgic frame that denies the culture its full life. Part Six is about what Appalachian culture actually is: not a museum exhibit, not a relic, not a curiosity, but a living, evolving body of practice and expression that has been shaped by every community that has ever lived in these mountains — Indigenous, African, European, immigrant — and that continues to change, absorb, and create.

Five chapters. Five dimensions of cultural life.

Music comes first because music is the thread most people can follow. But the chapter on Appalachian music is not the story of the Carter Family alone. It is the story of the banjo's African origins — the fact that the instrument most associated with white mountain culture was invented by Black people, and that its journey into white hands involved the same erasure and appropriation that marks so much of American cultural history. It is the story of shape-note singing and Sacred Harp, of Bill Monroe inventing bluegrass, of Ralph Stanley's unaccompanied voice echoing off a hillside, of Jean Ritchie carrying dulcimer music into the folk revival, of contemporary artists who refuse to be confined to the "Appalachian" shelf.

Then literature — the writers who have told these mountains from the inside: James Still, Harriette Arnow, Breece D'J Pancake, Lee Smith, Silas House, Ron Rash. And the voices that were excluded for too long: Crystal Wilkinson, Frank X Walker and the Affrilachian Poets, writers who insisted that Black and Appalachian were not contradictions. Then religion — not the snake handling that journalists love to film, but the complex web of Baptist, Methodist, Holiness, and Pentecostal traditions that served as social infrastructure, community anchor, and sometimes both support for and obstacle to social change. Then foodways and craft — ramps and cornbread and leather britches, quilts and baskets and chairs, the Foxfire project and the tension between tradition-as-practice and tradition-as-commodity. And finally, language — the Appalachian English that linguists recognize as a legitimate, rule-governed dialect with deep historical roots, and that the rest of America hears as the sound of ignorance.

That last point matters more than it might seem. How a person sounds determines, in America, how seriously they are taken. Appalachian English has been used for a century and a half as evidence of backwardness, and the people who speak it have been forced to choose: keep your voice and accept the consequences, or learn to code-switch and carry the weight of a doubled identity. The politics of how you sound are inseparable from the politics of who you are. Culture is not decoration laid on top of history. It is history, compressed and carried forward in every song, every recipe, every turn of phrase.

Chapters in Part Six

  • Chapter 27: Music of the Mountains — From British Isles ballads through the Bristol Sessions to bluegrass, country, and beyond. The banjo's African origins. Shape-note singing. The commodification of mountain music and the living tradition that outlasts it.

  • Chapter 28: Appalachian Literature — Writing the mountains from within. James Still, Harriette Arnow, Lee Smith, Silas House, Ron Rash. The Affrilachian Poets and Black Appalachian literary voices. The challenge of writing from inside a stereotyped region.

  • Chapter 29: Faith in the Hollers — Baptist, Methodist, Holiness, and Pentecostal traditions. Churches as community infrastructure. Snake handling in context. Religion's complex role in both supporting and opposing social change.

  • Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — Ramps, cornbread, leather britches. Quilting, basket-weaving, woodworking. The Foxfire project. Indigenous, African, and European roots. The tension between craft as tradition and craft as commodity.

  • Chapter 31: Language, Dialect, and the Politics of How You Sound — Appalachian English as a legitimate dialect. A-prefixing, double modals, Scots-Irish inheritance. Accent as class marker. Code-switching. Linguistic discrimination and the cost of sounding like where you are from.

Chapters in This Part