2006 – Issue 2 (April)

images/voice_uploads/AudParakeet.300.gif Think of the most remote Appalachian wilderness you have ever visited, and imagine that landscape if you time-traveled centuries into the past. Would it look much the same as it does today? Not likely, even though it may be “untouched.” The landscape would be filled with seemingly exotic species: towering chestnut trees, vast expanses…

Murals of old-time country music pioneers A.P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter line the walls of the Carter Family Fold. Children and grandmothers, teenagers and men in overalls stomp and twirl alongside each other. In the shadow of Clinch Mountain in southwest Virginia, the venue marks the birthplace of country music and has attracted musicians from…

images/voice_uploads/Circle.Spadero.gif Jack Spadaro was a young engineer in February 1972 when he arrived at the site of a coal waste dam failure that killed 125 people. He had grown up in coal country, and had worked in the mines to get through college. Even so, he was shocked. “I made a pledge to dedicate my…

Ask any one of the 10 delegates of seven organizations representing the voices of the dispossessed in Appalachia why they’re going to the United Nations on May 6-12, and they’ll all tell you the same thing. To fight for their human rights. The coalition is collectively organizing a side event at an upcoming U.N. meeting…

President George Bush’s proposed sale of 300,000 acres forest service lands may have been just a trial balloon for a larger land sale, as Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) suggested in late March. But the balloon seems to be deflating quickly. Most of the Appalachian region’s governors, senators and representatives speaking on the issue have opposed…

One hundred years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt worked with Congress to ADD land to our national forests. “ I am gravely concerned at the extremely unsatisfactory condition of the public land laws and at the prevalence of fraud under their present provisions. For much of this fraud the present laws are chiefly responsible. In fairness…

Ain’t no grave holding Carl Rutherford down. In death as in life he’s still making people laugh out loud, and his music continues to carry on like a contagious smile. Which is mostly all he wanted. “I’d like to leave an afterglow of smiles when life is done,” he told his cousin, Hershel Muncy, before…

images/voice_uploads/vulture,-b-(flt)—P050522-.gif The author is an Associate Professor of English at Radford University in Radford, Va. The vultures have come back. They swirl and mix above me as I ride my bike home on Sundell Drive, though not much sun reaches this shady street and there are no farmers in this dell. Only vultures. And deer.…

The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America By Jeff Biggers. Shoemaker & Hoard. 238 pages. $26.00 In 1966, Appalachian scholar Robert Munn observed that “more nonsense has been written about the Southern Mountains than any comparable area in the United States.” In the years since Munn’s comment,…