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Duelling Myths
Feb. 16th, 2004 07:46 pmHaving read a couple of books on Appalachia so far, namely Altina L. Waller's great deconstruction and reconstruction of the Hatfield-McCoy "feud" in the Tug River Valley, on the border of West Virginia and Kentucky - and Durwood Dunn's eponymous, loving study of the life and death of the settlement of Cades Cove, situated in the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, I'm really warming to the region and its history.
There's been an upsurge of interest in Appalachia recently - by folklorists and musicians who want to preserve the culture of the mountain communities, by anthropologists who want to study the relative isolation of these places and the people who lived there, and historians who want to recover the historical reality of these places and debunk the myths that they were a backward, degenerate people.
What's coming out of these new social studies is a very different picture from what Hollywood and the popular press has been feeding us all these decades ("Deliverance" has much to answer for). What is emerging is the picture of a fiercely communal people, self-sufficient in community and family ties but still linked politically and economically to the larger world outside. A people with a rich and sophisticated culture, and trying to find a compromise between generations of pre-capitalistic and pre-industrial living and the encroaching outside world.
In the meeting, some adapted, some did not, some fought back, some sold out - and yet, through all this, there is the lure of the mountains. They were not necessarily better people than everyone else, but they weren't primitives or perverts - just sometimes slightly out of pace with the rest of the world beyond the communally isolated worlds they called home, and trying to preserve that in the face of an increasing modernism that wanted to change everything.
And of course, wonderful, wonderful music, of which I'm just starting to discover a real appreciation for. Anybody want to give me pointers on bluegrass guitar, or take a weekend drive up to the Great Smoky Mountains?
There's been an upsurge of interest in Appalachia recently - by folklorists and musicians who want to preserve the culture of the mountain communities, by anthropologists who want to study the relative isolation of these places and the people who lived there, and historians who want to recover the historical reality of these places and debunk the myths that they were a backward, degenerate people.
What's coming out of these new social studies is a very different picture from what Hollywood and the popular press has been feeding us all these decades ("Deliverance" has much to answer for). What is emerging is the picture of a fiercely communal people, self-sufficient in community and family ties but still linked politically and economically to the larger world outside. A people with a rich and sophisticated culture, and trying to find a compromise between generations of pre-capitalistic and pre-industrial living and the encroaching outside world.
In the meeting, some adapted, some did not, some fought back, some sold out - and yet, through all this, there is the lure of the mountains. They were not necessarily better people than everyone else, but they weren't primitives or perverts - just sometimes slightly out of pace with the rest of the world beyond the communally isolated worlds they called home, and trying to preserve that in the face of an increasing modernism that wanted to change everything.
And of course, wonderful, wonderful music, of which I'm just starting to discover a real appreciation for. Anybody want to give me pointers on bluegrass guitar, or take a weekend drive up to the Great Smoky Mountains?
