Decoration Day in the Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern Appalachians (review)

Alan Jabbour and Karen Singer Jabbour's book Decoration Day in the Mountains begins with the description of a mythical journey from civilization to the wilderness: a boat ride in the mist across Fontana Lake to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where a large group of people observed what the Jabbours claim to be the defining Appalachian cultural ritual, the celebration of Decoration Day. On this day, families clean and decorate cemeteries where kin are buried and reconnect with past and present family and community members. National Park Service employees, who assisted with transportation and in numerous other ways facilitated the ceremony, met the Jabbours' group at the other side of the lake. People brought flowers to decorate the graves in their family cemeteries, and they brought food for the "dinner on the ground" that traditionally follows a brief service in the cemetery. With them also came their stories of life in the region before the establishment of the park and the building of Fontana Dam forced their families to move. These family and cultural histories form the core of this extensively researched book.

Alan Jabbour and his wife Karen Singer Jabbour, a photographer, jointly authored Decoration Day in the Mountains. Black-and-white photographs are interspersed with the text throughout the book, and color photographs form an insert in the center of the book. Thus, while the book contains a written history of an important ritual, it also documents that ritual with photographs of the people and places where that ritual takes place. Scholars of the upland South will be interested in the cultural history documented in the book, while others with ties to the region will read the book on a more personal level as a visual documentation of key family and community ceremonies.

In 2004 the National Park Service asked Alan Jabbour, a folklorist who spent much of his career working for the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, to undergo a study of Decoration Day for the North Shore Road Environmental Impact Statement. After completing the report, the Jabbours realized that they had tapped into a rich mine of material and began to look beyond the boundaries of the park to other cemeteries in the region. They soon discovered that although Decoration Day is a widespread tradition from the Appalachians to the Ozarks, it had not generated much literature. In addition, many scholars and even participants in Decoration Day confused it with the national celebration of Memorial Day. Although Jabbour notes connections to practices of the Druids in the British Isles and to the Day of the Dead in Mexico, he concludes that the ritual is a southern tradition that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.

Alan Jabbour opens the book with a description of two Decoration Day celebrations, one inside the park and one outside the park. In nine chapters, the book moves from Decoration Day in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with its unique political history, to celebrations outside the park in western North Carolina and westward across the South as immigrants carried the tradition with them. In addition to fifty interviews and visits to perhaps two hundred cemeteries in western North Carolina, the Jabbours also conducted in-depth interviews in Alabama and Arkansas on Decoration Day and researched decoration practices in most southern states. This research confirmed similar celebrations of Decoration Day across the South. At his web site, http://www.alanjabbour.com/photos_alabama_cemetery_tour.html, Alan Jabbour includes information about their Alabama research on Decoration Day, along with many photos of Alabama cemeteries.

The Jabbours believe Decoration Day to be the most important cultural ritual in Appalachia, embodying many of the values and characteristics of the region. The ceremony emphasizes the kinship ties of family, merging into links with the larger community; piety or reverence towards God...