The Idea of Appalachian Isolation

The Idea of Appalachian Isolation Michael Montgomery When it created the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the 1930s, the National Park Service decided to document the traditional life of the area. In 1937 it commissioned a young graduate student from Columbia University named Joseph Sargent Hall to visit the coves and hollows of the North Carolina and Tennessee mountains, which were in the process of being depopulated, to record the speech and music of people there. Working through local Civilian Conservation Corps camps, Hall began collecting material from natives of what was one of the more rugged sections of Southern Appalachia. His approach to collection was very informal: he asked few questions and recorded whatever people wanted to say or sing. The result was that he collected many lengthy stories, especially about bear hunting, and a variety of songs. At one session, a woman sang several traditional Child ballads. After finishing "Lord Thomas," she rendered "Come All You Young Ladies" to the untraditional tune of "On Top of Old Smoky." Shortly thereafter, she sang "Come All You Texas Rangers." The third song clearly did not originate in Appalachia, and as likely as not its singer learned it from the radio. The contrast between modern and traditional images in this episode strikes a familiar chord with those of us who study Appalachia. We can all probably identify similar cases, no matter what part of the region we're from or what our field of study. Such contrasts have been part of mountain life for a long time. Despite the many complexities and inconsistencies that confront an objective observer, commentators from outside Appalachia have long been inclined, often seemingly compelled, to see mountain people en 1 An earlier version of this paper was read at the 1997 Appalachian Studies Association meeting in Cincinnati. The author is grateful to Philip Obermiller and Anita Puckett for help in formulating ideas and pointing out important references. 2 Further information on Hall's fieldwork can be found in Hall 1939, 1942 and in Montgomery 1994. 20 masse and to view mountain culture as homogeneous and uniform. Their motivations range from a desire to recount sensational tales of violence and feuding to a benign hope to explain the mountains to fellow outlanders. But when they apply broad labels like "Appalachia" and "Southern Highlands" based on experience with only a few people or with individual communities, commentators produce false and misleading ideas about what does or does not characterize the culture and language of Appalachia people. A classic instance involves Horace Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders (1913). Kephart, a remarkably keen observer, was far more sympathetic to mountain people than many writers before and after him and wanted to give them their due. At the same time, he doubted that he understood mountaineers well enough to write about them. Scholars of the region are much indebted for the detailed record on many subjects he left behind. His chapter "Mountain Dialect" was the first thorough treatment of mountain speech and the only one for another two decades. The problem is that Kephart's commentary derived largely from experiences in one small and remote area in the southwestern corner of the Smokies, an upper branch of Hazel Creek, Swain County, North Carolina, where he lived from 1904 until 1907. Since he almost never qualified his statements, however, readers have naturally assumed that they applied to the entire southern highlands, as his title suggested. Some words he cited have been attested in no other study of mountain speech or in any reference work. Today we cannot know whether the verb block, "to blockade, make moonshine" and the noun bumblings, "cheap whiskey," among many others he collected, were at the turn of the century localized to one small area or more widely current in the mountains and merely unrecorded by others. From 1908 to 1910, Kephart traveled about the southern mountains to gauge how typical his Hazel Creek experience was, but in the end he presented as typical much that was rare and exotic from those earlier years. Kephart's theme (and that of many others to the present day) is that mountain speech differs from speech elsewhere in preserving far...