Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit: The Culture of Festivals in the American South

Chapter Three: Honoring the Cob: Hillbilly Days at Pikeville, Kentucky

C H A P T E R T H R E E HONORING THE COB Hillbilly Days at Pikeville, Kentucky ack before the age of reptiles, great layers of marble, schist, gneiss, granite, shale, sandstone and coal felt the crushing forces of the earth, and they cracked. These rocks, Precambrian crystalline, Paleozoic sedimentary and carboniferous metamorphic, crumpled and were uplifted. Rains fell, and the rocks were made wet. The water ran, and the rocks eroded, were worn down and cut crosswise by ancient rivers that had been running there first across the lands long before the mountains themselves were heaped up into ragged surges of rock and dirt. At least once since their first birth and that first upthrusting—as best the geologists can tell—after bearing silent witness to the formation of the Atlantic, these great rises of rock and dirt were blown by the winds and washed by the waters and worn by their weight all the way back down to lowland before being folded once again in subsequent upliftings. And then again once more these resurrected heights were dissected by unstoppable waters which spilled across the rocks and, draining the lands, shaped great long valleys from the soft shale and soluble limestone, and left long parallel ridges of sandstone and schist, the hard rocks which would not dissolve, like bone left in the wake of flesh. The valleys were then filled and the mountain tops covered with oak, poplar, hickory, hemlock, cedar, ash, maple, spruce, white pine, white birch, beech, basswood and tulip trees. These forested lands would be hunted by unremembered peoples and then by Shawnee and Cherokee, and it would come to pass that these mountains would be named the Appalachians. 65 B HILLBILLY DAYS In April 1993 I would go into those mountains, looking for a coal miner who called himself Dirty Ears. I had lately been reading about the politics of culture—about how modes of social behavior and mediated representations are shaped to serve political and economic ends. This wasa development of mylearning about, during my examination of the Tobacco Festival, some of the effects of county agents and the extension service. I had discovered how, for example,traditional beliefs about agriculture—planting by the moon, reading nature for hints about the weather—were discouraged and replaced with more scientific methods not only to increase productivity , but also to draw more farmers into the cash economy and make them purchasers of consumer goods. The result of these cultural interventions by agents, as we have seen, was to contribute to the depopulation ofthe countryside and to the development ofagribusiness. So, looking around for an event that would involve the politics of representation and cultural intervention, I remembered once hearing that every year in eastern Kentucky hundreds of Shriners from across North America come together in Pikeville, the seat of Pike County, in the heart of eastern Kentucky'sbillion-dollar coalfield.When I checked Teaching children about hillbilly heritage 66 HILLBILLY DAYS it out, I heard that they did indeed come, to howl and drink, dressed in hillbilly burlesque—patched overalls, floppy hats, and oversized boots, scuffed and holey; that they drove busted-up trucks decorated with chamber pots, animal hides, headless baby dolls, broken toilet seats, and broken outhouse doors cut with crescent moons; that they were the little-known but wildly popular subset of the better-known Ya'rab Shriners, the Imperial Ancient and Arabic Order of the Mystic Shrine shriners, the ones with the fezes, rubies in their belly buttons, and big cardboard scimitars, the ones who lay synchronized go-cart rubber in parades. I made some phone calls and confirmed the rumor. The Imperial Clan of Hillbillies, I discovered, was what they call a "sideline" degree to the Ya'rab Shriners—a club within a club—and their two honored symbols are the corncob and the crescent moon. Their emblem is a whiskered doofus in overallshefting a crockeryjug of'shine. When they speak, they call each other "cuzzin." When they gather, they drink corn likker. When they write in their newsletter, Hillbilly News, they feign a grotesque parody of the illiteracy that allowed the original inhabitants of the mountains to be easily exploited by coal and timber companies a hundred years ago: "Howdy Cuzzins . . .We'uns done enlightened a batch of poor flatlanders at our recent eye-nishation an the ret of us ole ridgerunners shore had a...