Appalachians and Love of Home

a common phrase thrown around when you hear people talk about appalachia is a sense of place appalachians really like their homeland whether it be uh you know a cabin tucked down in a hauler or a mansion on a hilltop appalachians historically have been fiercely attached to their homes i've often wondered if other inhabitants of the world people that live in different places if they have that same attachment to the place they live but i don't know because i've never lived anywhere but appalachia so i'll be interested please leave a comment let me know if you have experienced that if you know that people in other areas have that same fierce attachment to their land to their home that people in appalachia do loyal jones wrote a great book appalachian values that really details the values and kind of the personality traits of people who live in appalachia and i'm going to read you a little bit of his chapter on love of place so one of the first questions asked in the mountains after whose boy or girl are you is where are you from we are oriented around place we remember our home place and many of us go back as often as possible some of us think about going back for good perhaps to the nola chucky big sandy hi wassie or o'connell lefty or to drip rock hanging dog shooting creek decoy stinking creek sweetwater or sandy mush our place is close in our minds one fellow said he came from so far back in the mountains the sun set between his house and the road our songs tell of our regard for the land where we were born sense of place is one of the unifying values of mountain people and it makes it hard for us to leave the mountains and when we do we long to return this fellow died and went to heaven saint peter showed him around and he thought everything was up to expectations streets of gold heavenly choirs harps and then he heard these people in the corner of heaven raising an awful commotion coiling complaining and shouting he went over to investigate and found they were all chained up he said to saint peter who are these people they are appalachian mountaineers st peter said why are they chained to the wall st peter said if we didn't do that they'd go home every weekend albert stewart an eastern kentucky poet reflects a strong sense of place in his poetry as in this one near in mountains about his parents nearing mountains my youth well knows and under that self-same star my mother was born on troublesome creek my father was born on car my father rode there to troublesome creek and kissed her beneath that star then mother came here to live with us here on the waters of carr fast flow the waters of troublesome creek and strong flow the waters of carr that never shall abide by the resting place where mother and father are o near is the land where my father lived and troublesome was never so far but far and lost my parents lie high on the ridges of carr isn't that a beautiful poem and that was by let's go back and see for sure who it was by albert stewart that's just lovely another poem that uh little john shares in this chapter is from james steele so it says james still a northern alabama native now living in hindman kentucky expressed a feeling of home as well as it has been said in a poem entitled heritage i shall not leave these prison hills though they topple their barren heads to level earth and the forest slide uprooted out of the sky though the waters of troublesome of trace fork of sand lick rise in single body to glean the valley to drown lush penny royal to unravel rail fences though the sun ball strip breaks the ridges into dust and burns its strength into the blistered rock i cannot leave i cannot go away being of these hills being one with the fox stealing into the shadows one with the newborn foal the lumbering ox drawing green beach logs to mill one with the destin feet of man climbing and descending and one with death rising to bloom again i cannot go being of these hills i cannot pass beyond i hope you enjoyed that little excerpt from will john's book it's appalachian values that's a really great book if you've never read it i've thought about this sense of place a lot over the years as i've researched and studied appalachia and thought about my homeland where i'm from and i'm sure there's some scholar out there that could explain it to you in really great detail but i like to kind of keep things simple and in my mind that love of place a sense of place comes down to three different points first there's a sense of belonging to the actual terrain of appalachia you know it's the towering mountains that hover close around you the sparkling waters and the creeks that and rivers that sing your heart a merry song it's the wind in the pines and then the trees that whisper secrets it's um the deep dark colors that make you feel uh feel the presence of those who've walked them before you you know the very inhabitants that used to walk the same trails that you do in appalachia so that magical feeling of landscape is part of the sense of place it's that somehow you be you begin to really belong to those mountains and to those trees and to the rivers and to the creeks to the haulers to the high tops of ridges you know you actually become part of that somehow so i think that's the first reason that people in appalachia feel that real sense of place the second reason is generational ties are hard to break in appalachia in 2010 david anderson wrote a great blog post for me and i'll link that below so you can read it but about two of his ancestors he highlighted the fact in the blog post that 10 generations later descendants from those two ancestors were still living in the same general area we think about that 10 generations of people um kind of passing down the words like i love to talk about language passing down their food their culture their heritage the way they look at things their knowledge that's a lot of generations of a family living in the same general area well appalachia as a whole has a familial um culture so that means that we're not just really close to and the importance of family like the family unit thinking of mom dad brother sister but also grandparents both sides of the grandparents aunts and uncles cousins second cousins third cousins twice removed and even the family who lived down the road who wasn't technically family but were like family you know that was always at all your family functions those ties and relationships are so important in my own family i can think about the generational aspect of course my family's been in western north carolina for over nine generations so that's again a lot of people but thinking about family friends that weren't really family but were like family i can think of the the age group of pap and granny they were really close then their children which was me and then the other family's children were very close and then even to the next generation some of those kids and my children are close have grown up together so that's just a lot of ties that if you didn't live in the same place you wouldn't continue to foster those relationships and to to enrich enrich each other's lives by whether it was just fellowship and one with another or helping out when the need arose so those generational ties is the second reason that i think the sense of place in appalachia is so strong third the physical landscape of appalachia made in an isolated area for generations people it was hard to get out of the mountains it was hard to leave it's hard to imagine a place outside the mountains that was you know to leave to actually leave home and imagine living in a different place now in today's world of course it's not like that it's not as isolated most people have have their own cars they could drive there's airports you can be on a plane in two hours from my house and go to anywhere in the world that you want to go but i would argue that some areas of appalachia are still isolated even the area i live in there's like a joke i've heard my whole life so i live in the state of north carolina raleigh is my capital but we're so far from raleigh we're actually closer to i think it's like five other state capitals than we are to the to raleigh and so the joke has been my whole life is that you'll hear people say in this area of western north carolina really the tri-county region here where i live cherokee clay and graham where that you know if you're bemoaning the fact that maybe raleigh somebody in raleigh made a decision that affected you or maybe they for you know we don't get the short end of the stick or something like that the joke is you'll hear people say raleigh thinks asheville north carolina ends at asheville raleigh thinks that north carolina ends at asheville well we're two hours past asheville so it doesn't end at asheville but that's kind of so see that's kind of still in an isolated nature more than uh than being technically isolated like i said because today we can travel just those go back to those generational so the generation of the same family passing down their thoughts and the way they feel about things so that's kind of too and um it's kind of like it's fascinating for me to think about so even though things have changed and we're not as isolated that same mindset of thinking somehow makes you think in that like you're protected which in one way it's like a protection so you're protected in this wonderful place where you live and the other thing is though in your mind you just think of being isolated even though you're technically not but i do think that's the those reasons of still some places being isolated really and then the kind of the mindset of that being passed down over the generations that that's the third reason that sense of place is so strong for most appalachians i love to study on the sense of place about that being one of the values in appalachia i love to study on the people that i'm that i've known my experiences in my life and i really see that that sense of place whether it be that people like me who are like i could never live anywhere else are people that's like i had to move off to work but i can't wait to move back i'm gonna move back to my home place you know where i bought a piece of land near aunt pearl and i'm gonna live there and i'm so excited about moving back are the people who just find out how wonderful it is to live in appalachia and they move here reminds me of one of my very first interviews was my first interview i guess with elsie chasteen and the chasteen family and the wilson family have that generational tie that generation connection that i was talking about but anyway i asked elsie i said well what do you think about appalachia and he kind of chuckled and he said well i reckon if i didn't live here i'd be getting here as fast as i could so i love studying and thinking about those things and they remind me of this song bob amos if you're ever familiar with the group front range they were a bluegrass group they no longer are together but he wrote some amazing songs bob amos did and the one i really love is the hills that i call home now he's not talking about my area of appalachia but it's still just a beautiful song that talks about that that sense of place and i will read you my favorite line from it so it says yet i found no peace within me till the day that i returned for there's two things you can count on as the troubled world we face every season has an ending and every person has a place so appalachia is definitely my place [Music] i was born upon [Music] my [Music] here is [Music] and [Music] and there is [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] is [Music] the middle [Music] so there's so many things a lot of times that i read that scholars who don't live in appalachia are not from appalachia that they write about the area and i think well that's that's not really right or that's you know they kind of get it wrong but that one sense of place that one i think they get right there is that just that really strong sense of place where people love love their their home their homeland they call it or their home place it's just a really strong feeling and i certainly feel it here where i live and i would be the i guess the fourth generation of my family to live here on this land so i really that really means something to me when i think about those that walked off the path before me i hope you enjoyed this little talk about sense of place and how that's one of the values that appalachians have and i hope you leave me a comment and tell me do you have those same feelings or maybe you don't even live in appalachia but you have those same feelings but mostly i hope you'll drop back by often as i celebrate appalachia

Channel: Celebrating Appalachia

Views: 14,847

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Keywords: Sense of Place in Appalachia, Appalachia, Appalachian Mountains, Why people don't want to leave Appalachia, Why people live in Appalachia, Why is Appalachia Unique, What personality traits do Appalachians have, Appalachian Living Conditions 2021, Is it hard to live in Appalachia, Celebrating Appalachia, Love of place in Appalachia, Loyal Jones, Appalachian Values, Berea Kentucky

Id: 1qcHxxPTDNM

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021