A Millennial's view on Appalachia

can you tell us your name please my name is corey presley where were you born i was born in gainesville georgia where do you live now now i live in brycetown north carolina i've always lived in brycetown though had the privilege of living in the same house my whole life when you hear the word appalachia cory what comes to mind you know that's always a hard question to answer because a lot of things come to mind so for me of course one of the first things i think about is music because i am a musician so i think about old time music i think about fiddles and banjos and mandolins and guitars and i think about people putting up food cannon cannon food in the summer especially i think about people crocheting or knitting um and i definitely think just about people in the way of life that overall typically appalachian people are um friendly people friendly faces super family oriented um you know i think a mountain my part of appalachia has mountains not all of it does but a lot of things come to mind when i think of appalachian so you consider yourself i guess an appalachian yeah you know i do um i mean i was born and raised in appalachia and that's that's kind of a kind of a big debate a lot of people would say well you have to be born and raised in appalachia to be appalachian and i'm not saying either way i don't really have an opinion but then some people say well i wasn't born there but i've lived there 40 years out of my 80 whatever you know so i i feel like i am because i've been born and raised here but um but you would adopt the lifestyle if you wasn't yeah uh reminds me of my one of my first mountain folk interviews l.c chester he said i said what do you want to say about appalachia and he just really didn't even know why i was interviewing him but i always looked up to him my whole life and he was one of pat's best friends but he said well i don't know i guess i'd say i'd be getting if i didn't live here already i'd be getting here as fast as i could yeah so that's what you'd say huh oh yeah i mean especially about our pocket of the world in brasstown i mean lots of people probably know brasstown for the john c campbell folk school but this is just such a wonderful place to live i mean we the folk school has a gigantic influence in my life and um always has but just it's a small town it's a it's a small paced life it's lots of green space there's no noise pollution there's not really any air pollution there's never traffic anywhere you go you can feel safe to leave your doors unlocked at night although really no one should probably do that but you know that for me like that's what i want and what i need i i have plenty of time and space to have you know have a garden out back have chickens um in the yard i mean to me that's that's what it's all about so since you mentioned the garden so you grew up having a garden as a garden i should say how is the garden and or the um yeah just gardening how has that influenced your life oh yeah so some of my truthfully some of my first memories are of what um i would call the big garden that we used to have kind of before my grandpa passed away and then it got to the tree started growing in over it too much and there was no not enough sun and it was just kind of like okay it's time to kind of put this one to rest and start a new one but some of my first memories are of granny would take me and katie down there kind of down a hill and she would have on kid you not like two pairs of pants and two shirts and this was like july or august it was very hot but to keep the chiggers out and um all the bean leaves and we would pick beans and the rows were long and there were several of them and it was hours just back and forth and then you had to break them all and strain them all and then um you know you had to can them so for me that was especially in the summer just a normal thing of okay everybody has to help pick beans everybody's got he'll break them and then you know the canner hearing the the pressure the thing on it i can't think of the name that goes back and forth um so that's had a huge and then two for me that's it's normal to be able to go to the basement and get a can of deer meat get a can of green beans get a can of soup tomatoes whatever that's always always especially green beans always been like a staple so when i think of green beans the only green beans i think of are like in a mason jar in the basement on the shelf um which now as i'm older i see is like a real privilege but so do you think in today's when you think about your friends and neighbors here in brasstown do you think gardening is that important to most people i would say i mean at least where we would live i would say it's a mix i think some people well i know a lot of people do that and you can drive up and down the road and see gardens and then a lot of people don't i definitely think it's somewhat geographical you know i think in some states it's not as much of a thing i think it is definitely a big thing in the south and not only the south but i think a lot of it is excuse me geographical and i would say i mean i don't know i don't even know if i could say to even mix here truthfully here probably more people don't do it than do it than garden but there definitely is still people here that garden so we'll go back to uh when we were talking about appalachia just as a general so so you've grown up in appalachia you went to did you go to college yeah so i actually went to young harris college which is in georgia um we are probably 10 minutes from georgia 20 minutes from tennessee we're closer to like four state capitals um than our own but yeah so i i did go to college got a bachelor's degree graduated and i guess maybe 2016. so one of them when you think about appalachian unfortunately a lot of times there's uh people think of stereotypes which those do you know you can some of them exist to a certain degree then i've heard people say well there's always something behind it but i think um how do i say this i think sometimes you could hunt to make a stereotype true but then it's you can't never just make a blanket statement like one stereotype that i might say well maybe that's true in appalachia is that everybody everybody can play or sing because i certainly grew up in a family where that was true but then i know there's other families that that was not true right but anyway so thinking about your years in college and how you worked hard to get that degree that is one of those stereotypes though is that appalachians are often educated and educated so what do you think about that wow um there's kind of a lot of thoughts that come to mind that's definitely a huge stereotype that a lot of appalachian people are just kind of like hurting her old country people right um so for me though that's kind of twofold so i know a lot so i myself have a bachelor's degree and i know a lot of people who have bachelor's degrees or doctorates or masters and i know a lot of people but don't but here's the kind of key or the secret about the people that don't so perhaps they may seem uneducated and i use that with quotation marks um because they haven't been to school but i can think about people who live down the road for me who haven't been to college but there are some of this they're they're the smartest people i know and the smartest people i know because they've worked outside all their life or because um they've always had some kind of job where i mean well really i mean we we can talk about i mean my dad included um and you know i mean he never went to college but not to be prejudiced he can you know just because he's my dad he can do anything with his hands but it's because he's grown up always doing that or someone down the road who knows instinctually by heart how to plant by the signs and had a can all that knowledge that i would say that that's someone who's quite smart right so no they don't have a bachelor's degree but i have a bachelor's degree and i can't tell you instinctually how to plant by the signs and i can't change a tower on my car and you know etc so life experience is oftentimes in my opinion sometimes more valuable than you know classroom setting bachelor degree whatever okay um when you think about another stereotype about appalachia is speech so anyone that hears me immediately knows that i'm from the south and uh i don't really have as much of a broad southern accent but i have an appalachian accent most people would just think southern but so you you have an accent has that ever caused you any trouble or got you any attention i should say yeah it's not causing me trouble but it's definitely got me a lot of attention it got me a lot of attention at college which seemed odd because i'm like only live like 20 minutes down the road so don't you people but you know i i guess a lot of people going there wouldn't sound like me because we had like a large foreign population but so to me they had accents you know but to them we had accents um my sister and i but definitely sometimes people here will comment on it and i'll be like i don't know this is just how i talk um and i went went up north well twice in the last couple years and that was for sure everybody was like oh my gosh your accent but they kind of like to hear it and of course to me i was like my accent you guys have an accent so yeah so when you think about your appalachian culture and sounds like you're proud and happy to have been born into that culture what's some of the highlights the things that make you the the happiest to have been to to live in appalachia what stands out is some of the best attributes of it that's a good question really there's a lot for me i think uh just the focus on family on family is so important um and i know that exists in other cultures as well but um there's been at least a minor upbringing in appalachia a huge focus on family a huge focus on hard work on doing the right thing on um you know my household on god um christianity but which of course is a major part of my life but just there's so many things i mean especially now that i'm older even just thinking back to like i said being in the garden with granny and picking beans or playing with the chickens in the yard especially years ago when we were kids when we first got them that was a really cool thing um and even you know crochet that's a huge part of my life and my grandma passed that down and she learned from her mom who learned from her mom um that's a big deal and on that note i would have to say if i just had kind of a highlight reel of memories one of my favorites would be um going down to my grandma's house because we were fortunate enough to grow up so close to our grandparents house that i could probably throw a rock from here and hit it and we would go down there um and that's another thing that's somewhat appalachian for sure i think too is um like geographically where you live a lot of the times it's like one family and then they have the kids and then the kids get older and then they move and then before you know it it's just kind of like a whole um family compound which is cool but anyways we would go down there because they were kind of like our babysitters during the daytime and i remember sitting in pap's chair and granny would have on tv i don't have any kind of idea what it was now but it was just craft shows and it would be these old ladies making stuff and i and wasn't even necessarily crochet but i thought that was so cool and i could sit there for hours and watch them make stuff um you know and then eventually she crocheted you know my whole childhood that i can remember and then eventually she taught me and now i love it and and it's such a fun hobby and i couldn't imagine not doing it um definitely music though gosh that's just i mean music was there from the very beginning that's in some of my very first memories so i've got a lot of good good memories about it and so you were talking about you get your love of crochet which you're about to turn into granny that crochets constantly but what about your love of music where did that influence come from yeah so really from day one you know there was music around whether that was in the car on the stereo on the radio whatever um but largely where the influence came from was our grandpa which i'm sure most of you um have heard about um in previous blog posts and things like that and he largely was our influence so he played music with his brother um the wilson brothers and they had a band that was you know somewhat famous and known kind of around here and in the kind of general southeast area and they toured the southeast and made tapes and cds and they would practice in our basement before it was too junky and they would practice every night and that would drift up straight through the floor and i would hear that i would go to sleep to that and um you know even at family outings it was it was just the norm for someone to pull out a guitar and be like let's sing this song and so it was very very much a part of my life and so we grew up singing and i kind of like to say i think maybe we were singing since we could talk and you know then at about 12 13 we picked up instruments but um largely the influence was pap and his brother and just all the music i was just exposed though to a lot of music because it wasn't just that for me looking back i mean it's even memorable of there was always music in the car it was kind of more like blue grass gospel stuff if i rode with mom it was more like old country if i rode with that and we used to have this huge stereo that was like that big that set in the house and i can remember listening to marty robbins and merle haggard and you know it it just was always there so but mostly the influence really i mean came from came from my grandpa so corey if you had to go back to the very beginning of what we were talking about and you had to sum up it's really a difficult question i don't know if you can answer it but if you had to sum up appalachia with one word what would you say oh man oh gosh that's so hard if i had to sum it up with one word okay this is old-timey a word sort of because to me that encompasses like everything that is kind of the old school of canning your own food living the small town life you have chickens in your backyard perhaps and um and you have some kind of crafter hobby your you know strong connection to your family in the land so i guess that old timey maybe would be my one word it's it's interesting just i said i was going to close but this will be my last statement but it's interesting that you you would choose that word but yet we've already talked about during this little talk or interview that you're you have a bachelor's degree that you went to college and i might add for people that don't know you were very young when you got that bachelor's degree because you had already went to college during your high school years yeah so of course that's kind of cutting edge modern technology along with the old-timey so that's that's a really neat um juxtaposition i guess of the two things so you're a young millennial who's been to college and has a college degree but yet those old-timey ways still are what you're holding on to so in other words i guess what i'm trying to say is those old-timey ways fit perfectly in our modern world you don't need to go back in time to live no and that's the thing for sure you don't have to go back in time um you know now sure we don't have to preserve every single bit of our food or we starve to death you know we have grocery stores we have indoor plumbing we have uh you know cars i mean we you know we have modern conveniences but you can still um honor the old traditions in the old ways and still live in modern society and that's one thing that i think can also be a stereotype it's like oh you know they're like backwards country people but you can still i mean i feel like we're living proof of that i don't feel backwards or are odd or you know whatever but i definitely feel like i still honor the traditions and i want to that's important to me um you know i couldn't imagine living life any other way i hope you enjoyed my first interview from appalachia it was a real learning experience if you enjoyed the video i hope you'll share it with your friends and neighbors and most of all i hope you'll drop back by often as i celebrate appalachia

Channel: Celebrating Appalachia

Views: 13,467

Rating: 4.9906325 out of 5

Keywords: millennial's view on Appalachia, Millennials in Appalachia, Interview with millennial, Appalachian mountains, Appalachia, Education in Appalachia, Millennial interview youtube, Millennial views, honoring the old ways, honoring tradition, living the old time way, old-timey, old timey

Id: IixrnFQrnhQ

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2020