Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal

Jean Ritchie: The Preservationist

Jean Ritchie The Preservationist I come from the mountains, Kentucky’s my home Where the wild deer and black bear so lately did roam By cool rushin’ waterfalls the wildflowers dream and through every green valley there runs a clear stream Now there’s scenes of destruction on every hand and there’s only black waters run down through my land Sad scenes of destruction on every hand black waters, black waters run down through the land. —Jean Ritchie, “Black Waters” Jean Ritchie’s eyes haven’t changed since she was a young girl. At eighty-six years old, they are as blue as blown glass, full of wisdom and cleverness and intensity and, above all, kindness. Kindness lights up Ritchie’s entire face, so clear and real that it causes her to seem almost not of this world. Beatific. And she possesses the same kindness in her hands, in the slight, humble bend of her neck, in her beaming smile. And of course that kindness is what comes through the clearest, the cleanest, in her voice. It is there in her speaking voice, but also in her singing voice, the quality that has caused the New York Times to proclaim her “a national treasure” and the reason Ritchie has become widely known as “the mother of folk.” As soon as she enters the dining room of her home on the highest hill in Port Washington, New York, the natural illumination of her face is enhanced when she steps into the white light falling through the picture window over her dining table on this winter midday and she says, “Welcome, welcome,” in her gentle way. Jean Ritchie, hindman, kentucky. Photo by Silas house. JEAn RItChIE  She pats her red hair, which she has just pulled up with a barrette on each side, her trademark part straight and exactly in the middle of her head. In that light, with a smile that covers first her mouth and then her entire face, for a split second she is a girl again. No matter all the knowledge those blue eyes hold: they must have been full of wisdom even then. For just a moment she is a child again, a girl frozen forever in time, the Singing Girl of the Cumberlands. Her eyes must have looked just this way at the age of twelve, as she described herself in her 1955 book, Singing Family of the Cumberlands: I watched the brightening sky and was proud that I could feel the frail beauty of it. I felt proud of my . . . lonesome feelings. I felt proud that I was who I was. I wondered if anyone would ever understand how much was in my mind and heart. I wondered if ever there’d come somebody who would know. You couldn’t talk about such things. You had to talk about corn and dishes and brooms and meetings and lengths of cloth and lettuce beds. If you should start to talk about the other things—the things inside you—folks might think you were getting above your raising. Highfalutin. Maybe I was the only one. Maybe nobody else in this world felt the things I felt and thought the things I thought in my mind. It wouldn’t be long after having these thoughts that Ritchie would venture out into the world to find others like herself. But before that journey began, she learned nearly everything that would carry her through the rest of her life from her family and neighbors in the small community of Viper, in Perry County, Kentucky, where she was born in a cabin on the banks of Elk Branch in December 1922. Ritchie, the daughter of Abigail and Balis, was the youngest of fourteen, and a surprise to her mother, who was forty-four years old when Ritchie was born. “It’s a mystery to me that the house don’t fly all to pieces,” her mother used SOmEthIng’S RISIng  to say, according to Ritchie. “I don’t rightly know where they all get to of a night.” Ritchie, as the title of her book suggests, grew up in a singing family, a family who would gather on the porch every evening to “sing up the moon.” They did everything together, singing all the while. “We’d sing while we worked and played, while we walked or did anything at all,” Ritchie says. “We’d sing in the...