Free Republic

Sometime during the past few years, the country started talking differently about white Americans of modest means. Early in the Obama era, the ennobling language of campaign pundits prevailed. There was much discussion of “white working-class voters,” with whom the Democrats, and especially Barack Obama, were having such trouble connecting. Never mind that this overbroad category of Americans — the exit pollsters’ definition was anyone without a four-year college degree, or more than a third of the electorate — obliterated major differences in geography, ethnicity, and culture. The label served to conjure a vast swath of salt-of-the-earth citizens living and...

Ralph Stanley, a patriarch of Appalachian music who with his brother Carter helped expand and popularize the genre that became known as bluegrass, died Thursday. He was 89. Stanley died at his home in Sandy Ridge, Virginia, because of difficulties from skin cancer, publicist Kirt Webster said. Stanley was born and raised in Big Spraddle, Virginia, a land of coal mines and deep forests where he and his brother formed the Stanley Brothers and their Clinch Mountain Boys in 1946. Their father would sing them old traditional songs like "Man of Constant Sorrow," while their mother, a banjo player, taught...

A black bear bit through the tent and into the lower leg of a man who was hiking the Appalachian Trail and camped for the night at a national park in Tennessee, park officials said on Thursday. Bradley Veeder, 49, of Las Vegas, was sleeping around 11 p.m. local time in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on Tuesday when the bear attacked, park spokeswoman Dana Soehn said by telephone. Because it was so dark, Veeder and nearby campers did not see the bear, which was initially scared away by his screams, Soehn said. Park officials said it was a...

As if the election results weren't enough proof that Donald Trump absolutely dominated Appalachia, this map offers a pretty good picture of just how widespread the presumptive GOP nominee's support is in the region:

During his victory speech Tuesday night after the Indiana primary, Donald Trump emphasized a region that could be ground zero for support: Appalachia. “The miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, Ohio and all over, they’re going to start to work again,” Trump said. “We are not going to be like Hillary Clinton,” he said, taking aim at her ill-timed remarks last more for which she ultimately apologized. Once upon a time in coal country -- states stretching along the Appalachian Mountains and the Marcellus Shale, a formation rich in underground resources like natural gas and coal -- the Clinton...

Officials ponder changing cat’s status, causing roar of protest; sighting a ‘U.F.O.’ Diana Marchibroda insists she saw the beast near the Appalachian Trail in Virginia in May. From the woods sauntered a “tall, very sleek” mountain lion, she says. Ms. Marchibroda, a dentist who is 62 years old, says she and her silver-haired miniature schnauzer, Sophie, “both watched in awe.” “My sighting is ABSOLUTE,” she wrote the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in July. “I know what I saw.” Dozens of similar missives have poured into the agency as it proposes removing the Eastern mountain lion from the list of...

Patton Couch shook his head and clenched his teeth, recounting the night four years ago when he plucked a dirty needle from a pile at a flophouse and jabbed it into his scarred arm. He knew the odds; most of the addicts in the room probably had hepatitis C. "All I cared about was how soon and how fast I could get it in," he says. "I hated myself, it was misery. But when you're in the grips of it, the only way I thought I could escape it was one more time." Couch, 25 years old and one month...

Baltimore Is Not About Race Government-induced dependency is the problem—and it’s one with a long history. By William McGurn May 4, 2015 For those who see the rioting in Baltimore as primarily about race, two broad reactions dominate. One group sees rampaging young men fouling their own neighborhoods and concludes nothing can be done because the social pathologies are so overwhelming. In some cities, this view manifests itself in the unspoken but cynical policing that effectively cedes whole neighborhoods to the thugs. Opinion Journal Video Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Jason Riley on what prompted the violence and what comes next....

youtube.com/watch?v=KiETwztU3cAAlexander Courage, Dolorous Theme, "The Waltons", Season 5, # 8 "The Wedding", Part 2 (November 4, 1976) The Waltons marked a departure from Hollywood's deprecation of Southern culture, customary since the advent of movie sound. Contrary to the Lil' Abner/Jubilation T. Cornpone approach, Alexander Courage's vastly underappreciated treatment of musical themes are of unknown, literal authenticity. The approach in this piece seems a combination of Cecil Sharp and Frederick Delius. 

The rules put in place by the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency have dealt a severe blow to the economy of the Appalachian region. The most recent proposal could be the death knell if they are enacted. More than 500 active and retired coal miners from West Virginia and other parts of Appalachia delivered that message to Washington Tuesday. The protest is the most recent demonstration against the clean power rule which would change the rules for emissions on existing coal fired power plants in the United States. The rally, led by the United Mine Workers Union, called on the...

Owsley County, Ky. – There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky, the last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw materials for a modern American economy that would soon run out of profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have been known, without any...

Ministries in Appalachia are bracing for a tough winter as hundreds of residents have been furloughed or lost their jobs because of cutbacks in coal production amid the nation's changing energy industry. A single employer, Arch Coal, laid off 750 workers across Appalachia in August. Other companies have been forced to idle employees or close operations.

Join Popcorn Sutton and J.B. as they do what they do best, one last time. This film is unavailable ANYWHERE as it was Mr Sutton's to distribute personally and I felt that it was worth sharing. Film maker NEAL HUTCHESON- 2009 Emmy Award winner- created this outstanding work of art. I own no copyrights to this film. Credit goes to the film maker, Neal Hutcheson, and Popcorn Sutton. R.I.P Mr. Sutton.- You are missed. - WildlifeSeriaLKiller

Sin eaters and the custom of sin eating seem to come from Wales. Early descriptions of the ritual all mention the bread eaten over the corpse, as well as the payment of sixpence to the person assuming the sins of the dead. Below are two 19th century accounts of sin eaters. "In the county of Hereford was an old custom at funerals to hire poor people, who were to take upon them all the sins of the party deceased, and were called sin-eaters. One of them, I remember, lived in a cottage on Ross high-way. The manner was thus: when...

In what the Wall Street Journal dubbed as an “unusual move,” President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday that is was reversing a Bush-era decision and revoking a critical permit for the largest mountaintop-removal coal mining projects ever proposed in Appalachia. According to the Journal:The decision to revoke the permit for Arch Coal Inc.’s Spruce Mine No. 1 in West Virginia’s rural Logan County marks the first time the EPA has withdrawn a water permit for a mining project that had previously been issued.It’s also only the second time in the 39-year history of the federal Clean Water Act that...

Dateline did an expose tonight on southern Ohio poverty

In the century following the Civil War, nothing brought change to Appalachia as much as did the development of coal mining. The western highlands of Southern Appalachia overlay vast fields of bituminous coal and the construction of railroads into the mountains opened up coalfields for commercial exploitation. By the end of the 19th Century, Appalachian coal was powering the industrial revolution in America, providing fuel for power plants, locomotives and other steam engines, and coke for making steel.

Originally published in Field & Stream magazine in 1909, this is the second part of an article written by Horace Kephart, a Pennsylvania-born writer and outdoorsman who moved to a cabin in Hazel Creek in the Great Smoky Mountains in 1904. Best known for his book "Our Southern Highlanders" (1913; rev. ed 1922), Kephart loved the mountains and the mountaineers and wrote using accurately-rendered Appalachian English.

Cole came to America with his family in 1818. With little formal training in the art of painting, Cole was recognized as a landscape artist by his mid-twenties. Beginning in about 1833, Cole maintained a studio in Catskill, New York, where he painted many landscapes of the Catskill Mountains and other areas of the Northern Appalachians. [Images of 10 Cole landscapes]

Originally published in Field & Stream magazine in 1909, this article was written by Horace Kephart, best known for "Our Southern Highlanders" (1913; rev. ed 1922). A "come-here," Kephart loved the mountains and the mountaineers. "Bear Hunting in the Smokies" is a delightful story complete with accurately rendered Appalachian English, tall tales, and howling gales.