The Truth about Entertainment in Appalachia

so what do people in appalachia want to do for entertainment well speaking for my family you've probably if you've seen several of my videos you've probably already guessed we like to make music that's one of the ways we might we love to be entertained is making music whether we're making it for a performance somewhere or just sitting around in the kitchen goofing and playing music that's just what we like to do you've probably also seen that we spend a lot of times in the woods we love to be in the woods that's really our main entertainment is that whether it's hot summer like it is right now you can probably see sweat sweat rolling off or in the cold winter where we build a fire we love to be out and about in the outdoors it's just rewarding enjoyable makes you feel like you're away from everything so that's our primary source of entertainment of course we like to read books i love to read books katie you've seen her enough of her probably to know she loves rock so that's it's her business but it's also an entertainment because it's something she loves about for me personally i love appalachia so even though it's my work it's what i do for a living i love to read about it i love to hear stories i love to find out something i didn't know you know i love to talk about the language so there's just various things for entertainment that people like to do of course that's my family when it comes to other families their their choices differ and you know one of the fallacies about appalachia is that like well all they like to do is uh their main entertainment is making moonshine and drinking it no that's not true there are people who make moonshine there are people who drink a lot whether they make it or go buy it that's certainly true it's certainly true that appalachia is like much of the rest of the country it's the same there's people whose entertainment in appalachia that live right down the road from me probably their entertainment is video games they love video games not just playing them in their house they love to get online ever how people do i'm not sure because i don't play video games but how they play with people from different areas maybe all over the world there's people who enjoy that there's people who enjoy sports of course all different sports they play they coach they go to the ball games they watch all the ball games on tv racing all the things in mainstream watching movies and tv shows and all that all the things that you think of as entertainment for all of the country the united states as a whole whether you're talking about new york city or brasstown north carolina you'll find some of the exact same interest uh it's just not it's just is a fallacy that people in appalachia only make moonshine and drink it and then do other horrible things you know i don't even need to go into that all the terrible stereotypes but for a lot of like i said my family and friends that i know their entertainment is it's part of what brings them joy is what entertainment is so it's entertaining their faith whether it's worship going to church singing worshiping out in the great outdoors like this or in your special place wherever it's at it's their family what's more entertaining than spending time with your kids and your maybe your nieces and your nephews and your grandkids your aunts and uncles listen to those old stories your grandma your grandpa all those things that's a form of entertainment since being outside is one of our favorite things to do for entertainment i'm going to show you a few of the sights and sounds we see today as we we hang out in the woods together and fellowship and enjoy the creek and enjoy some good food we brought some dinner we're going to cook and just enjoy being with each other so stick around for that and please make sure that you leave a comment and tell me what you do for entertainment is it just hanging out with your friends is it spending time with your family maybe it's those ball games or video games or maybe it's watching celebrating appalachia on youtube one of the prettiest things about the mountains of appalachia or the springs you can see right here is a spring up in there comes way out of the mountain and you see it trickling down it actually divides itself it's really dry here now it would be a little bit fuller it turns into this little branch going down through here and then this branch continues on down the way till it filters into stamey creek i've always loved these small spring fed branches when i was a little kid i just thought they were magical it was one of my favorite places that i love to play i would find one like this i guess because it was accessible you didn't have to worry about getting you know washed away if you were small and the water was intimidating you could dig and find all the little small round rocks that you wanted they were just it was just a good place to play good place to have a little playhouse as an adult i think they're magical i mean magical in the way that it's just one of those things in the world that we don't know how how the creator thought to make all these things but how waters from the mighty deep bubble up into all these various springs come out into the into the world into the land into the woods and trickle away you know like i said this little creek is going to go down to the stamey creek which is going to go on down to brasstown creek and on down to the highway river and on and on and on and and amazing that it starts here this is just one of many many many in many different locations but that it provides for the animals it provides for people and days gone by when they you know were spring-fed houses that's how you got your drinking water even when i was growing up until i was in eighth grade we drank from the spring we had gravity water just one of the very magical things and a great place to hang out on a hot august day [Applause] [Applause] about every summer when i was growing up one of the cousins or me or paul come up with the idea that we should dam up the creek you know then we could have a real swimming hole we could have a big one well we we might have once or twice got it deep enough to lay down in but we never did succeed in really getting it deep but a lot of people another favorite thing we like to do is to look for spring lizards and way back in the day you could still sell them for fish bait i think that's illegal now but so there was that i think we mostly did it just for pap or whoever was going to go fishing for them to be able to to use them but a lot of people on some of katie's videos about rocks some some people will say well you're disturbing the environment you're oh my gosh it's so horrible you're killing things well to begin with we wouldn't if we caught a lizard today we'd just let it go we wouldn't kill it but as far as destroying the environment the creeks and the world actually now i'm all far safe in the environment don't get me wrong but a kid or even a grown-up playing in the creek is not going to damage the environment our creeks are much stronger much sturdier than that and for eons whether it was people washing their clothes in them our kids playing in them whether they were catching lizards trying to dam them up for for summer fun or just sticking their feet in them i mean that's just happened since the beginning of time people are drawn to water of course because they need it to drink but also as a force or a source of entertainment a source of cooling off source like i said washing their clothes it's just mesmerizing so i don't think that we're endangering the environment by playing a little bit in the creek [Applause] aren't the rocks amazing all of them no wonder katie loves them i loved them when i was little but i never managed to make anything out of them like she does but when i was little i would find one like that i would look for the perfect one every time i went to the creek and take them home i still have some of them somewhere they're not really katie would tell you the kind that you could do much with as far as polishing because they're brittle and they'll break but they sure are pretty so okay i'm gonna cut it so um uh it tastes just like a potpourri on a bunch of people's toilet smells it's blueberry it's got blueberry in it it's delicious blueberry chocolate yeah right there's nasty oh it's delicious they make what you say it tastes like katie she said potpourri the potpourri that you find on the back of people's toilets and people never ate potpourri nobody's what it smells like they're trying to decorate the bathroom be real nice and that's just what it tastes like is how that nasty potpourri smells and they just trying to do something nice that ain't no grasshopper i don't know what that is sure it is look at that that ain't that is not a grasshopper i shouldn't correct it that ain't let me grab top come home with you and jump out and bite you that would be the ultimate irony i wasn't just about you on your own i wouldn't like that see this cedar bark that i got out of georgia down there turkey hunting back in the spring [Music] i like popular crews i think they're pretty and then the woods in them is pretty good evening is pretty good being attached to where you live is not a bad time you'll hand me a break i'll break it up um [Music] foreign um so this is the saw that i used to cut up the firewood for our little cook fire we're going to cook on and it's a spring creek i think spring creek manufacturing folding bucks off and it folds down really small and you put it in the pack and it works really really good for cutting what we what we just cut that size wood it cut six seven inch diameter wood i think but it works really well and it just folds down comes apart and it actually so it folds down and the blade goes inside the main tube [Music] and it just falls down into a just a little stick about 18 20 inches long and you stuff that down in your pack and it's good a good tool to have in the woods so [Music] day [Music] uh [Music] foreign [Music] i like that little carbon fiber bow dang i forgot how much i like that middle sounds awful good too yeah this is why i brought it i know i like mine awful well i just like it because i know it it's mine [Music] especially after they did that work on it it's pretty little rock too somebody bought it that's 68 years old [Music] do [Music] daddy [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'm telling you i like this little bow david give me this too your fiddle music blesses me well i'm coming from a family of guitar pickers fiddle music sue's my soul well thank you what are you trying to say to me [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] i might go back to it too that's irritating big enough we have tomatoes can i have that instead of my steak i'm kind of over the steak yeah i know somebody will take care of your steak so we're about to eat dinner matt's cooked up some squash and zucchini and peppers and ham forest over the fire we've got some tomatoes fresh out of the garden some peaches corybra and some chips i have enough never know though all right somebody served themselves go right ahead what you do with one music so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] be [Music] [Music] daddy [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] um so we built a little fire to cook our dinner on matt's making some hot chocolate right now but even if we hadn't ate we would have made some kind of little fire in an appalachia that's called a gnat smoke this time of the year you think why in the world would you build a fire and it's so hot well and that smoke is not really this high doesn't burn this high it's just a little smoldering kind of fire with smoke going out very smoky and that's to prevent bugs from coming around where the people are gathered where they're gathered up talking so when i was young anytime we sat outside in the in the of an evening as the as the day was almost gone pap would build a little mat smoke and to ward off all the bugs while we were sitting around enjoying each other's company see this big briar this is what we call a saw briar a saw briar means that you better watch out it's got some long thorns and they will grab a hold of you before you know it and they can cut the blood out of you so a lot of people ask us when they see these videos of us wandering around in the woods are you not afraid of animals of wild animals well there are wild animals in appalachia of course there's even right here where i live there's bear there's coyote bobcats there's painters or stories of painters i have a good painters story i need to tell you so there are animals but most the time those animals hear you long before you ever even know they're around and they skedaddle because they don't want to have nothing to do with you either even when you invade their territory but things you do have to watch out for are like these sawbrayers you'll be going along and not even noticing if you're not paying attention and you get tangled up and this is a huge sawbrayer they go all over this little area where men corey's standing and you don't pay any attention and before you know it you're cut up your clothes are tore and you're bleeding all from a sawbrayer see this little terrapin he's hid up in there maybe it's a her maybe she's about to lay some eggs i don't know we've seen the terrapin as we were coming in and we've come back to look at it so some people call them i guess the real name for them is a box turtle that's what that's the probably if not you can tell me that i'm wrong that's okay but my whole life growing up pap and granny called them terrapins so that's how what i call them is a terrapin people have varying opinions about them you're not supposed to bother them of course because you know you're liable to get salmonella or some kind of poisoning from them i have my niece when she was a little girl she would find a terrapin in the yard she would keep it for a pet for a few days feed it grass feed it different things and then she'd paint a little streak of fingernail polish on it like to mark it and then she'd let it go one time we were up up in the woods entertainment like i said like we like to do we were way up above where we are now and we seen a terrapin and it had a little stripe of pink on it so i was like see that little terrapin it's making tracks for moccasin creek hoping that a little girl never catches it again but in appalachia you'll hear lots of stories about kids keeping terrapins for pets and then turning them loose another story that you'll hear sometimes john paris wrote about it is see all those beautiful markings on its shell they're so pretty is that the cherokee indians they say that those markings tell a story now i can't tell the story i don't know if if it was a certain indian that could read them and tell the story or if that was kind of general knowledge with the cherokee but isn't that wonderful to think about so that tells me that the cherokee actually loved the terrapins as much as i do i think it's a baby dragonfly he was washing down the creek and i saved him oh the way he goes see the pretty red isn't that beautiful those beautiful colors so when i was a little girl these were the ones i love to pick up out of the creek i don't know if you can see but that one's like two-tone one side's one color and one side's the other color i also like these long ones like that all of these have just been wore by the creek that's why they're shaped like that they're tossed and turned and just wore eventually they'll wear into nothing sometimes you find one that's got a little indention that one's got like and you wonder what in the world made that little it's just a little round rock except for that one place fascinating advice in the calmer sections of the creek over at the edges where the fast water is not running there's where you can find water spiders see that one some people call them water skimmers seems like there's another name we always call them water spiders and i'm always amazed by how they sit there sit there and wait you can see that one's it's this is really pretty the shadow underneath it that's a water spider on you hey you

Channel: Celebrating Appalachia

Views: 26,141

Rating: 4.9880881 out of 5

Keywords: Things to do in Appalachia, Things to do in southern Appalachia, Regional activities in southern Appalachia, Appalachia, Appalachian mountains, terrapins in Appalachia, saw briars in Appalachia, playing in the creek, Appalachian sterotypes, moonshine, hiking in Appalachia, spending time outdoors, being in the woods for fun, Spring Creek Folding Saw, Fiddle Tunes, The Pressley Girls, Tombigbee Waltz, Indian Point Fiddle Tune, Real life in Appalachia, The Truth about Appalachia

Id: Dja6kcCDPM8

Length: 33min 36sec (2016 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 19 2021