By Stephen Smoot
Within the broad and deep category of country and western music comes a subgenre with no definite name. Some call it, along with related books, motion pictures, and television programs “Appalachian Gothic.”
Appalachian Gothic differs from the 19th century “local color” genre. Local color writers’ audiences lay in the northeastern cities and enjoyed tales of the exotic and unfamiliar. Some authors based their fictional works on places they saw on vacation.
Others, like Kentucky’s John Fox and Hampshire County’s Rebecca Harding Davis, portrayed the strange and different of their own home areas to regale readers who thus formed their impressions of a geographical concept never referred to prior to the Civil War – Appalachia.
Appalachian Gothic and local color artists hit on similar subjects, similar themes, and similar types of people. The difference lies in the audience. Local color artists want to shock and awe outsiders. Appalachian Gothic artists craft stories for other Appalachians.
The overriding theme connecting all Appalachian Gothic artistry lies in resilience. That resilience can come in the face of externally imposed disaster, poverty, fate, or misfortune. It can take the form of straight drama, such as the films Sergeant York or Matewan. It loves to wrap serious tales of real problems in comedy, such as the Appalachian inspired regional favorite The Dukes of Hazzard. The world of Appalachian Gothic actively, and more so than almost any other style of American music, connects civitas terrena and civitas deo along with other concepts, such as fate.
Because what happens in life is the will of God, in Appalachian Gothic it is man’s job to make the best of it all.
David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four English Folkways in America identifies Appalachian culture as stemming from the North English border country between York and lowland Scotland. Most later called “Scots-Irish” really hail from this region. Fischer used descriptions of life to illustrate the culture, such as “cabin architecture” there, which was noted for “roughness and impermanence” as well as being a “product of a world of scarcity.”
That world of scarcity extended to the American frontier, which to these immigrants looked mighty familiar, being the same mountain range (just separated by the geological processes of hundreds of millions of years) in which they lived before coming across the ocean.
Loretta Lynn, one of the first ladies of Appalachian Gothic, evoked a Kentucky version of what life in an impoverished cabin could look like. Complete with local speech patterns, “Coal Miner’s Daughter” provides a glimpse of the childhood of millions of early to mid-20th century children. Lynn sang about life “in a cabin, on a hill in Butcher Holler.”
Lynn’s song lionizes the unsung heroes of that way of life. She sings of her “daddy” who “worked all night in the Van Lear coal mines” and “all day long in the field a hoin’ corn,” combining the modern industrial way of work with centuries of learned traditions of self-reliance. She also remembers how her mother scrubbed laundry until she “seen her fingers bleed,” but “to complain there was no need.”
Resilience meant keeping ones problems to oneself because, as in Hank Williams Sr’s “Thy Burdens Are Greater Than Mine,” one can always find someone much less fortunate.
But “the memories of a coal miner’s daughter” were good, however, because “we were poor, but we had love.”
One of the other reigning ladies of the genre, Dolly Parton, sang of how those traditions of strength and even love could face misunderstanding and ridicule from the conventional world. She sang of her mother making the most of what little the family had when her daughter had no winter coat. “Mama sewed the rags together . . . and “told a story/From the Bible she had read/About a coat of many colors/Joseph wore.”
She took pride in the love, craftsmanship, and resourcefulness of her mother, only to go to school “just to find the others laughing/and making fun of me.” The fact that her mother was “sewin’ every piece with love” gave her understanding in the face of hatred and ridicule from outsiders that “one is only poor/Only if they choose to be.” The tale being autobiographical adds impact since the singer and songwriter grew to enjoy tremendous success and respect.
Appalachian Gothic songs, however, also illustrate over and over again the strange ways of fate. One of the earliest radio stars of country music, Raleigh County’s “Blind” Alfred Reed, penned a song about the 1907 Monongah mine disaster called “Explosion in the Fairmount (sic) Mine.” It told the tale of another young coal miner’s daughter waking up from a nightmare.
She screams “Daddy please don’t go down in that hole today/For my dreams do come true sometimes you know.” Her dream told her of “every man . . . fighting for his life” as “the mines were burning out with fire.” Her father indulges his frightened child and avoids “an explosion” where “two hundred men/were shut in the mines and left to die.”
One never learns why fate used the child to spare her father, nor is the larger question ever discussed. Appalachian people take both the fortunes and misfortunes in life as both given and best not questioned.
Fate also imposes its will negatively, as in Darrell Scott’s “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” recently sang by Brad Paisley for the Appalachian Gothic television series “Justified.” Scott, from London, Kentucky, wrote a loose family history featuring other themes, such as the good and evil of coal and trying to escape the fate of staying in the backcountry to find something better.
In Harlan County, “the sun comes up about 10 in the morning/and the sun goes down about three in the day.” “You fill your cup” both literally and figuratively with “whatever bitter brew you’re drinking/and you spend your life just thinking of how to get away.”
Scott’s story follows his grandparents selling land in Harlan and moving about 70 miles away to Hindman. “Granddad’s Dad” moved his family out to escape what is almost stated as a curse – “you’ll never leave Harlan alive.” They leave home to escape the new industrialism and embrace the farming traditions of old, but when they couldn’t sell their crops to pay their bills, “Granddad knew what he’d do to survive/He went and dug Harlan coal and sent the money back to Granny/But he never left Harlan alive.”
Appalachian Gothic knows how to envelop tales of privation in a light-hearted package, such as with Marion County’s “Little” Jimmy Dickens. Partnering with Brad Paisley brought Dickens back for a Generation X audience, who were inspired to explore his work. “(I Got) A Hole In My Pocket” tells the listener that “I got a hole in my pocket and my money just runs on through,” leaving him without money for a date to the fair. The result, he fears, is that “she’ll travel through the tunnel of love with someone new.”
Even more dramatic, yet also comedic, came “Take An Old Cold Tater and Wait.” Adults often got the best of the food while children received scraps. “I’d have to be right still/Until the whole crowd ate/My Mama always said to me/’Jim take a tater and wait.’” Later in the song, Dickens shares the results of a diet of privation, saying “that is why I look so bad/and have these puny ways” and “it makes you pretty darned weak/to take an old cold tater and wait.”
Clashes between the conventional “outside” world and the resilience of Appalachian people, coupled with the need to do what’s necessary to survive, inspire the outlaw side of Appalachian Gothic.
“Rocky Top,” the official state song of Tennessee, bears a vague reference to the murder of law enforcement officers. “Revenuers” from the federal Treasury Department sought out “moonshiners” who used hidden stills and fast cars to make and distribute illicit liquor and booby traps to protect their operations. In this song “once two strangers climbed ol’ Rocky Top lookin’ for a moonshine still/Strangers ain’t come down from Rocky Top/Reckon they never will.”
The next generation, in song and reality, took illegal production to the next level. Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road,” tells how law enforcement murdered a man’s moonshiner family. The protagonist signed up for “two tours of duty in Vietnam/And when I came home I had a new plan.” He planted marijuana in the hollers and warned in the defiant spirit of the Appalachians “I learned a thing or two from Charlie dontcha know/ You better stay away from Copperhead Road.”
Most recently, and also part of the “Justified” influence, comes the group “Gangstergrass” that fuses Appalachian ballad traditions with rap and hip hop styles. “Long Hard Times to Come” embodies much of the masculine ethos of Appalachia in a single work. “Lonely traveler, ain’t trying to battle ya/But if you’re feeling tuff dog, I welcome all challengers.”
The song features the dichotomy of what it means to be a man in Appalachia, the life balance between what is and what should be, recognizing a different wider world while staying true to one’s own, and giving fair warning about one’s own toughness to a world actively trying to break down the individual and ignoring his right to be himself.
In many ways, this song illustrates the social, cultural, and political frustrations simmering in the region that have boiled over as the federal government and other institutions have grown increasingly hostile to the Appalachian way of life and values.
“You probably think I’m crazy or got some loose screws,” the protagonist admits. He pleads, just as the entire Appalachian culture does to the national “But that’s aight though. Ima do me, you do you. So how you judging me? I’m just trying to survive.”
Gangstergrass, however, also sings about the wages of sin in the earthly world through their song “You Can Never Go Home Again.” So much of Gangstergrass taps into the connections that Fischer noted in Albion’s Seed, the oft ignored cultural confluence of upcountry poor white and black American culture. Though many over the centuries have worked diligently to keep these two cultures separate and hostile, they exist as brother ways of life, sharing basic values on many levels.
One of these includes the culture of incarceration.
“You Can Never Go Home Again” may be a narrator chastizing a character. It could be two sides of the same man’s psyche. The song never makes that clear. What it does is to share the dramatic and destructive impact of going to prison. They sing “my charges I could not defend/The last thing the judge said to me as he handed down my sentence/ Was you can never go home again.”
It later explains “when you’ve done your time and you come back out that doorway/You will not find a loved one or a friend/You may return to the place where the people used to know you/But you can never go home again.”
This work reflects an Appalachian point of view, blaming not society but the individual, asking “what was in your head when you made those choices?/ I can only hope that you were played by voices.” It’s not clear whether those “voices” would have come from his own head or wayward companions.
The song shares the destruction wrecked on their own when people turn to crime. Part of the song almost seems a spiritual sequel to Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried,” when it says “you broke Mama’s heart and it ain’t even nice/Now I’m surprised as heck that she’s wondering where you went/ And I don’t give a d***, friend.”
The protagonist ends up regretting “the dirty deeds I did just to get to eat/Melancholy and emptiness/The unseen consequences of the conditions of release.”
Within Appalachian Gothic comes fictional tales of truth. Never beautiful, but never ugly either, they serve as the haunting chronicles of a people and place – as well as the travails imposed by themselves, each other, the outside world, Mother Nature, Fate, and even God Himself.