Building a Bigger Choir

I remember, ten years ago, when Appalachian Voices founder Harvard Ayers first came to me with the concept of Appalachian Voices. He and a group of volunteers wanted to give the people of Appalachia a voice in the biggest environmental decisions facing the region. Their vision was to get information to all of us who…

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Last Song of Black Creek

Monday I went to fetch Jack home. It wasn’t my place, I know. I was his second-best, his nut-brown maid; I was familiar and base, fit only to serve. But I served him last, and I served him best. It was almost dusk when I saddled up Roan and led him from the barn. Granny’s…

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A Moment of Crisis for the Region’s Forests

images/voice_uploads/Deforestacion_02-.gif I have lived near Blowing Rock (always between Burke and Watauga Counties) since 1979. I, like many of you reading this now, remember Blowing Rock in the eighties with P.B. Scotts, The Farm House, Holley’s, Clyde’s, Antler’s, The Mayview Manor, and Blowing Rock as a different resort town than it is today. I watched,…

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Blaze Orange and Forest Green

Like just about every other 9-year-old boy in rural America in the 1960s, I received a Crosman BB gun as a Christmas gift. That present sent me down the trail of a lifetime of hunting, although I don’t remember killing a living thing with it. I did fire at a mouse once, while I was…

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America’s Adopted Fruit

Many newcomers to the Appalachians lament the fact that a person is not defined as a native unless one’s family has lived in the area for generations. In the natural world, the definition is even more stringent. In short, if it wasn’t here when Columbus arrived, it is not native; though numerous Old World plants…

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The High Cost of Coal

As this, the fall issue of the Appalachian Voice goes to press, millions of Americans are flocking to the mountains to see the gorgeous vistas of autumn foliage as they can only be seen in the Appalachians, home of the most diverse forests in the nation. According to a mapping project recently completed by Appalachian…

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Storytelling at Jonesboro

images/voice_uploads/Story.DonaldDavis2.gif David Holt makes a living playing music with the likes of Doc Watson, a legendary blind musician from the mountains of North Carolina’s High Country. But, Holt is also known to thousands as a storyteller. He’s known to spin yarns like a spider spins webs. “I usually either try to include music in the…

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Handbook Describes Storytelling Traditions

One of the difficulties facing Appalachian Studies has always been the lack of a good, single volume that would examine the multitude of issues and topics that, taken as a whole, would provide a good introduction to Appalachia. Such a book would need to include sections on history, natural resources, and the diverse backgrounds of…

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Orville Hicks – The Last Beech Mountain Storyteller

images/voice_uploads/Hicks1.gif “When we growed up there in Beech Mountain didn’t have nothin on it. When we growed up in that holler up over there, it’s a different world back there than it is today. We would go back up on the porch at night and hear bobcats scream coming across the mountain – panther sometimes.…

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Mountaintop Rmoval Lobby Week Shows Determination

For most of the past two years Appalachian Voices has been putting tremendous effort into building a base of citizen activists to advance the passage of the “Clean Water Protection Act” (HR 2719) in the United States House of Representatives. The Clean Water Protection Act would make it illegal to dump the waste material created…

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