The Appalachian Voice
Paul Corbit Brown: Truth Before Profit
By Jamie Goodman Paul Corbit Brown’s life has come full circle – thanks to the lens on his camera. He was born into a coal miner’s family in Kilsyth, W.Va. For generations, every male in his family had become coal miners, but a chance encounter when he was 12 years old ultimately resulted in a…
Read MoreFollowing the Patchwork Path
Quilt Trails Drive Rural Economic Revival By Dana Kuhnline Barn quilts, a relatively new art form that draws on rich rural craft traditions of the past, are helping communities answer an important economic question. “How do we get travelers off the four-lane highways and into communities where they might never go otherwise? How do we…
Read MoreBringin’ Anachronism Back
Modern Adventures in Traditional Appalachian Craft By Julie Johnson I was 25, slogging through yet another post-college retail job, when I realized I should run away to the hills and be a craftperson’s apprentice. It was a dream nurtured since childhood; I longed to be slavishly worked for naught but the benefit of a hands-on…
Read MoreKnock on Wood
How to Make a More Sustainable Guitar By Brian Sewell Wayne Henderson, a renowned musician and luthier, spends most of his time in the workshop beside his home in rural Rugby, Va. Some of the finest acoustic guitars in the world are made in that small space. Today, he’s working alongside a few of his…
Read MoreJackson County Green Energy Park
Garbage to Gas to Arts By Cinthia Miller It is hard to imagine that a landfill, the final place for mounds of household trash, could ever be a valuable resource, but Jackson County, N.C., is proving that even garbage has a use. In 1994, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency created the Landfill Methane Outreach Program…
Read MoreFrom These Hills
Contemporary Art in the Southern Appalachians By Paige Campbell Through Feb. 19, the William King Museum and Center for Cultural Art and Heritage in Abingdon, Va., will host the tenth exhibition of From These Hills: Contemporary Art in the Southern Appalachian Highlands, its biennial selection of new works by regional artists. Guest juror Amy Moorefield,…
Read MoreTalking Tradition
By Molly Moore According to Gary Carden, the Scot-Irish people of Appalachia don’t communicate in dialogue. They communicate in stories. “When I was a child, [storytelling] was called lying,” Carden says. A renowned storyteller, Carden was raised by his Scot-Irish grandparents in the Balsam Mountains of Western North Carolina. Carden recalls a childhood scene from…
Read MoreWriting the Ballad Novels: Sharyn McCrumb In Her Own Words
My father’s family settled the North Carolina mountains in the 1790s, and I grew up in a swirl of tales: mountain legends, ballads and scraps of Appalachian history. My first ancestor to settle in these mountains was Malcolm McCourry, chronicled in my novel The Songcatcher. As a child in 1751 he was kidnapped from a…
Read MoreAppalachian Documentaries
By Theresa L. Burris Residents of Appalachia have encountered prejudice through all types of media, some based on stereotypes of coal mining society. Fortunately, conscientious documentarians have surfaced over the years. They counter negative images of the region and examine the humanitarian struggles that come from the nation’s fossil fuel dependency and its inevitable consequences…
Read MoreA Simple Approach to Stewardship
An excerpt from a sermon by Pat Watkins Lots of people of faith have rejected the overwhelming attractions of consumerism and have begun to give simple gifts at Christmas. Consumerism, which seems to overshadow Christmas far more than any theological reflections, has caused untold damage to our relationships with each other and with the planet.…
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