Fred
Chappell. Backsass: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2004. 54 pages. $24.95 in cloth. $16.95 in trade paperback.
What a shame that such a common pastime has come to be called
not “backsass” but “bitching.” In
the first place the new term makes no attempt to fathom the crucial distinction
between “sass” and “backsass.” Furthermore, it has terrible
connotations of gender exclusivity and puts the onus on the speaker, not those
who often deserve the backsass appropriately given to them. Ah, such is the downward
spiral of civilization! But, hark, brighten up, friends and foes; what’s
that I hear? The sound of hooves—indeed our knight in shining Armour-All
has returned to right the world and rejuvenate that more endearing term. Hat’s
off to Fred! Hooray. And thanks, Fred, for publishing one of these backsass treasures
first in Appalachian Heritage and for crediting us, when you deserve all the
credit! “In learning, scope, and grace, Chappell is one of the truly rare
participants in the great converation what is the Western literary tradition.” – Henry
Taylor. “With savage wit and arresting candor, Backsass kids us toward
becoming wiser, franker, truer to our better natures. Rarely are moral lessons
so hilarious.” – X. J. Kennedy. This volume brings to an even dozen
the poetry books by Fred Chappell to go with his two story collections and eight
novels and even a Fred Chappell Reader which combines genres. A native of Canton,
North Carolina, he has taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
since 1964.
C. A. Curry. The Williams: A Historical View and Other Pocahontas
Memories. Parsons, WV: McClain Publishing Company, 2003. 157 pages with photos.
Trade
paperback. $12.00.
The Williams referred to here is the Williams River, one of eight rivers
that tumble out of the scenic rural mountains of Pocahontas County, West
Virginia.
This memoir concentrates on fishing and tramping around in the woods enjoying
the creatures found there. A native who returned after fifty years in the
outside world is the author.
Victor Depta. A West Virginia Trilogy: Novels.
Ashland, KY: Blair Mountain Press, 2004. 475 pages. $15.00.
This book consists of three novels: The Gate of Paradise, Idol and Sanctuary,
and Feasting with Strife. It is for you if you want your novels to have plenty
of sex, lots of cussing, gratuitous violence, deep themes and artistic rendering.
Depta, a native of Buffalo Creek in the West Virginia coalfields, has recently
retired from an academic career mostly at the University of Tennessee at
Martin.
William M. Drennen, Jr., & Kojo
(William T.) Jones, Jr. Red, White, Black and Blue: A Dual
Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia. Athens:
Ohio University
Press, 2004. 220 pages with an index and bibliography. $44.95 in cloth and
$17.95 in trade paperback.
What a great idea, and how well it is pulled off. This book consists of five
pairs of essays written in turn by a white upper-middle class man and a black
man who were both born in 1942 and both grew up in the South Hills section
of Charleston, West Virginia. Editor Dolores M. Johnson, herself a black
female, has done a masterful job of combining these two stories of living
through segregation
and desegregation. The result is a good read and lots of grist for reflection.
Elizabeth
S.D. Engelhardt. The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian
Literature. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. 207 pages
with an index, bibliography, notes and photos. $49.95 in cloth and $24.95
in trade paperback.
This is one of the most important and impressive books ever published about
Appalachian literature. Also it is an outstanding contribution to the understanding
of American feminist and environmental writing at the turn of the twentieth
century. In particular it illuminates the lives and careers of three East
Tennessee writers, Emma Bell Miles, Grace MacGowan Cooke, and Mary Noalles
Murfree, and
of Effie Waller Smith, a Black woman from Pike County, Kentucky. In addition,
it puts their work in the context of the kind of writing done by those less
sensitive to environmental and gender issues, notably Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy
and Olive Dame Campbell. This book deserves to be widely read, and has the
potential to dramatically expand the accepted cannon of early twentieth century
feminist and ecological writing. The author teaches at West Virginia University.
Alex
Gabbard. Checkmate. Knoxville: GPPress, 2003. 294 pages. Trade paperback.
$15.95.
This self-published novel features assassins, government bomb-builders, wanna-be
rock stars, secret agents, pianists, and computer nerds in a plot-driven
tale of fantastic intrigue. It moves from place to place all over the world,
but
centers on Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The author grew up in Berea, Kentucky, and
moved to a western North Carolina farm as a teenager. He lives near Knoxville,
Tennessee.
Mary Bozeman Hodges. Plastic Santa and Other Stories. Oak
Ridge, TN: Tellico Books/Iris Press, 2003. 71 pages. Undersized
trade paperback.
$12.00.
These eight short stories typically take place during the Christmas season
but have a much broader appeal. “Mary Hodges has always been the funniest
writer in Appalachia. But with Plastic Santa she does what the best writers
do: conjure up all the essential emotions, whether it be laughter, tears, nostalgia,
anger, regret or pure joy.” – Silas House. The author was born
and raised in Jefferson City, Tennessee. She lived away from the region while
her husband served as a federal agent, but she now lives in Talbott, Tennessee,
and teaches English at Carson-Newman College.
Everett G. Marshall. Rich Man:
Daniel Boone: An Historical Report on the Boone Trail Highway and Memorial
Association Chartered by the State of North Carolina
in 1913, Joseph Hampton Rich, Managing-Director. Dugspur, VA: Sugar Tree
Enterprises, 2003. 323 pages with maps, photos, drawings
and appendix. Trade paperback.
$19.95.
The title is a play on words as this book is a tribute to Joseph Hampton
Rich (1874-1949), the man who spent twenty-five years erecting monuments
to Boone
in an effort to encourage the building of good roads, especially in Appalachia.
Although 358 were erected, only 135 still stand, but these are all inventoried
in this book. The author lives in Hillsville, Virginia, and is active in
local historical societies.
Jack H. Lepa. The Shenandoah Valley Campaign in
1864. Jefferson, NC: 2003. 252 pages with an index, bibliography, notes,
photos, diagrams and maps.
Hardback with pictorial cover, $45.00.
This book presents the Civil War events in the Shenandoah Valley during
the year 1864. The emphasis is on the perspective of the ordinary soldier.
The
author lives in Las Vegas.
Susan M. Lefler. Images of America: Brevard. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2004.
128 pages with a bibliography and lots of photographs. Trade paperback. $19.95.
Readers of Appalachian Heritage know Lefler as an outstanding writer, and many
know this series of town histories for its interesting, entertaining and endearing
nostalgic photographs. Not only is this volume better written than most, it
also features more fascinating photos. The author has lived in Brevard since
1976. She writes regularly for Smoky Mountain Living.
Jeanne McDonald. Water
Dreams. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 306 pages. Hardback
in dust jacket. $25.00.
This is a strikingly excellent first novel. Middle-aged, middle-class Miller
Sharp unsuccessfully attempts to save a drowning man and then becomes more
and more involved in his family and working class culture to the point of
becoming his wife’s lover. “Water Dreams takes us in its unrelenting grip
and does not let go until we examine every inch of the abyss it exhibits. Jeanne
McDonald undertakes the themes of responsibility and loss of self-respect with
the authority of an accomplished master.” – Fred Chappell. “…a
serious meditation upon chance, fate, love and responsibility. Like all the
best storytellers, Jeanne McDonald knows how to disappear and let the story
take over.” – Lee Smith. The author lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.
E. Lynn Miller. Fresh Fish: A Civil War Prisoner’s
Story. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 2003. 150 pages with a bibliography,
notes, and illustrations.
Trade paperback. $12.95.
What an engrossing book! This is the story of the great-great-grandfather of
the author. The subject was a native of Braxton County, West Virginia, who
fought for the Confederacy and was then held in a series of Union prisons.
It is the depth, the exhilarating detail that sets this book apart and makes
everything from the agony to the trivia of the War truly come alive. The author
graduated from WVU, did graduate work at Harvard and was a professor at Penn
State for forty years before he embarked on the extensive research that went
into this book. The title comes from an exclamation still common among prison
guards when a new batch of prisoners arrives.
Deborah Hubbard Nelson-Campbell, editor. The Journals of Tommie L. Hubbard:
Life in Madison County, Kentucky, 1898-1900.
Jesse Stuart Foundation: Ashland, KY, 2003. 256 pages with an index, maps,
an introduction and lots of photos. Hardback in dust jacket. $22.00.
The heart of this book is the journals of the author’s paternal grandmother,
who lived on a farm just east of Richmond, Kentucky, in Madison County. An
extensive introduction and a date line of national and international news flesh
out the book. The result is a fascinating view of everyday life. When the journals
begin, Tommie Hubbard was nineteen years old. She had been married for two
years, and she lived in her parents’ home with her husband. During the
two years the journals covers she gave birth to her only child. The author
is a professor of French Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Part of the Voices of the Civil War series edited by Peter S. Carmichael, this
volume not only presents the diary of John G. Earnest, but also a biographical
sketch of this East Tennessean who opted for the Confederacy presumably because
he was a student at the overwhelmingly Confederate Emory and Henry College
in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The book also includes a sketch of his
superior officer, John C. Vaughn. The author is a retired investment manager
who lives in Birmingham. He is also the great-grandson of the subject,
Betty J. Reed. The Brevard Rosenwald School: Black Education and Community
Building in a Southern Appalachian Town, 1920-1966. Jefferson, NC: McFarland
and Company, 2004. 235 pages with an index, selected bibliography, appendices
and photos. Trade paperback. $30.00.
Part of the Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies II series from the
publisher, this is a thorough and impressive study of the segregated Black
school in Brevard, North Carolina. The author is a part-time instructor at
the Transylvania Center of Blue Ridge Community College in Brevard.
What a splendid coffee-table book! What a cool celebration of the folk music
(with some jazz and rock, but no country) of Knoxville from the sixties through
the nineties. It includes writing from more than one hundred authors including
musicians like Sparky Rucker and John McCutcheon, deejays, promoters, writers
and “scenesters.” The editor is a performer and journalist who
moved to Knoxville from Cleveland, TN, in 1971.
George R. Triplett. Our Proud Mountain Roots and Heritage. Parsons, WV: McClain
Printing Company, 2003. 371 pages with an index and many photos. Hardback in
dust jacket. $35.00.
This is a book about Upper Cheat River Basin, located mostly in Randolph County,
West Virginia. About one-third of it is photos, about another third is family
history and the first third is railroad history. The author grew up on Shaver’s
Fork of the Cheat.
Joseph M. Scolnick and N. Brent Kennedy. From Anatolia to Appalachia: A Turkish-American
Dialogue. 130 pages. Cloth, $40.00. Trade paperback, $18.95.
Undaunted by the fact that the DNA study reported in its pages did not conclusively
find Turkish blood among the Melungeons, the co-editors, Scolnick, undeniably
of Turkish, and Kennedy, of mixed Melungeon ancestry, interview each other
concerning their speculation about the connections.
Vivian Shipley. Gleanings: Old Poems. New Poems. Hammond: The Louisiana Literary
Press, 2003. 187 pages. Hardback in dust jacket, $26.00. Trade paperback, $15.00.
Vivian Shipley grew up mostly in the country in Hardin County, Kentucky, with
relatives further east. She is now a Professor at Southern Connecticut State
University and editor of The Connecticut Review, one of America’s finest
literary magazines. This book is her tenth poetry collection. “Vivian
Shipley’s poetry is distinguished by how much of life and life’s
joyous energy it manages to convey” – Dana Gioia. “Vivian
Shipley does not escape escapeless brutality of truth in poems strong on Kentucky,
mother-love, deep memories of rural life. The richness of substance of these
poems is their style. These poems bring dark and bright insights to the reader.” – Richard
Eberhart.
R. T. Smith. Brightwood: Poems. Baton Rouge: The Louisiana State University
Press, 2004. 64 pages. Hardback in dust jacket, $22.95. Trade paperback,
$15.95.
My favorite is “Directly.” What a perfect subject for a poem: an
idiom which is chock full of rich nuances. This poem beautifully captures the
irony of the hugeness of a sometimes seemingly inconsequential folk expression.
At the same time, it also calls attention to the apparently counterintuitive
but often stark consistency in its common usage. Beyond all that, the poem
gives the reader a true feel for the woman using the expression and of the
wider wisdom implicit in her use of this vibrant word. “Vernacular, down-home,
these are poems given to remembering, and they make a faithful account. They
find healing in a brightwood fiddle and in willowspout, gospel in the spoils
of experience, grace radiant in the way words bear witness to how pain and
music are inescapably linked” - Margaret Gibson. “Meaning and language
are perfectly married in this splendid work.” – Lee Smith. The
author is from Georgia and North Carolina and presently lives in Rockbridge
County, Virginia, where he edits Shenandoah for Washington and Lee University.
This brings the number of his poetry books to an even dozen.
Thomas E. Wagner and Phillip J. Overmiller. African American Miners and Migrants:
The Eastern Kentucky Social Club. Champaign: The University of Illinois Press,
2004. 158 pages with an index, bibliography, notes and lots of photos. Cloth,
$35.00. Trade paperback, $20.00.
The Eastern Kentucky Social Club began in 1967 at the Red Satin Lounge in Cleveland,
Ohio, when a group of Black migrants from the Benham and Lynch coal camps in
Harlan County, Kentucky, gathered. Since then, there have been annual Labor
Day reunions that have been held at various cities (Atlanta last year and Las
Vegas next). Annual reunions also take place back home on Memorial Day. Presently
eleven chapters are still active. The authors don’t tell the reader this
until the book is almost over. That’s because they are among the foremost
experts on Appalachian migration and they begin by creating the context first
by exploring African-Americans in coal camps in general and then in Harlan
County camps. This book is an important addition to regional scholarship.
Donna Akers Warmuth. Boone: Images of America. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing,
2003. 128 pages full of photos. Trade paperback. $19.99.
This is another in the series of photo books. It revolves around 200 nifty
old photos of Boone and environs.
West, Don. No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poetry edited by Jeff Biggers
and George Brosi. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004. 227 pages
with an index, bibliography and photos. Cloth, $55.00. Trade paperback, $25.00.
Don West (1906-1992) was one of the most charismatic and important activists,
educators, historians, poets and pamphleteers to come out of the Appalachian
South in the middle of the 20th century. A native of Gilmer County in the Georgia
mountains, West, along with Jesse Stuart and James Still, graduated from Lincoln
Memorial University in 1929 and went from there to Vanderbilt. In 1932 West
co-founded The Highlander Center with Myles Horton and then began a career
as a leftist organizer in the textile mills of North Carolina and the coal
mines of Kentucky. In the 1960s he founded the Appalachian South Folklife Center
at Pipestem, West Virginia. He is one of three “heroes” in the
initial set of commemorative t-shirts created by the Appalachian Studies Association.
This book reprints much of his prose and poetry and includes an outstanding
biographical essay by Biggers and a mediocre “Afterword” by Brosi.
Wayne Winkler. Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungeons of Appalachia. Macon,
GA: Mercer University Press, 2004. 313 pages with an index, Sources, appendices
and photos. Hardback in dust jacket. $34.00.
The person generally considered to be the foremost expert on all things Melungeon,
N. Brent Kennedy, calls this “as complete a history of these people as
we have seen to date.” That’s pretty high praise, but it is well
justified. The Melungeons are a fascinating group of people typically with
dark complexions but Caucasian features who have lived as long as anybody knows
on Newman’s Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee. This book is certainly
a welcome addition to the scholarship of this group, but also of the region
as a whole.
Newly Reprinted Books
David Hunter. Trailer Trash from Tennessee: A Childhood
Memoir. Oak Ridge, TN: Tellico Books/Iris Press, a 2003 reprint of a 1995
release. 199 pages.
Trade paperback. $16.00.
I reckon since the author is writing about himself he has the right to use
this language, but it is a disconcerting way to try to diffuse prejudice.
The book is basically a memoir of growing up in a working class neighborhood
of
Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1950s. The content and style of the book makes
it surely worthy of a better title.
Bill C. Malone. Singing Cowboys and Musical
Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music. Athens:
The University of Georgia Press, a
2003 reprint of a 1993 release. 155 pages with index and notes. Trade paperback.
$15.95.
Bill Malone is one of the greatest experts on regional music, and here he
vividly traces the origins of commercial country music. It won the book award
given
by the Popular Culture Association in 1994.
Books for Young Readers
Shutta Crum. My Mountain Song. New York: Clarion Books/Houghton-Mifflin, 2004.
24 unnumbered pages illustrated in full color by Ted Rand. Oversized hardback
in dust jacket. $16.00.
The author was born in Johnson County, Kentucky, in the mountains, but was
raised in Michigan. In this picture book intended to be read to children,
she tells a partially autobiographical story of a little girl on a summer
visit
to her grandparents. She tells it with wit and charm, and Rand has truly
nailed the spirit of the story with his pictures. Overall, this is a delightful
addition
to the genre.
Connie Jordan Green. The War at Home. Oak Ridge: Tellico Books,
a 2003 eprint of a 1989 release. 138 pages. Trade paperback. $15.00.
This partially autobiographical youth novel for upper elementary students
tell a story of growing up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II.
George Ella Lyon. Weaving the Rainbow. New York: Antheneum/Simon & Schuster,
2004. 24 un-numbered pages illustrated in full color by Stephanie Anderson.
Oversized hardback in dust jacket. $15.95.
George Ella Lyon, a native of Harlan County, Kentucky, and a long-time Lexington
resident is one of the leading regional picture book authors. This story of
a sheep farm has all of her trademarks—clever and fun wording, and an
endearing story. The illustrations reflect the high quality that only the finest
children’s authors can command from New York publishers.
C. M. Millen. Blue Bowl Down: An Appalachian Rhyme. Cambridge,MA: Candlewick
Press, 2004. 24 un-numbered pages illustrated in full color by Holly Meade.
Oversized hardback in dust jacket. $16.99.
I can’t enjoy this otherwise delightful little picture book because the “baby,” pictured
as a toddler, keeps doing stuff that would be dangerous and downright impossible
even for a toddler to do, like lighting the candles or lifting a huge ceramic
bowl. The author lives in Toledo, Ohio.