What is an Appalachian Holler?

[Music] hey guys this is real appalachia with shane and melody and we are going to do something and answer a question once and for all i'm going to put melody on the spot and she's going to tell us all what a holler is yes what is a holler are you up for this challenge i am you guys asked we're here with your answer if you like this video give us a thumbs up subscribe so you don't miss out on any of our videos including all of our taller videos let's give you a little sneak preview this particular holler i took a great picture from here cracking on myself i guess it did great it's beautiful the hauler did all the work and you can't i'm going to tell you what a holler is but you can see perfectly here how it sits in the valley and we're going to get into more of that here in just a minute sounds good let's get on the road what are you saying all right well we're on the road here and we thought it's high time we answered the question that is burning on so many minds what is a hauler what is a hauler what is a hauler shane you tell us melody of course you've got me on the spot no we can haul there is a hollow as known in other parts of the country we spell it h-o-l-l-e-r yes i thought you spell it h-o-l-l-o-w yes but it's the same thing it's just our pronunciation it's different yeah and holler and we spell it the way we hear it yes and it's basically a road and homes in a valley between two mountains um there's usually some water running through it and if you look to your left yes you'll see that there's a little creek or creek as some people call them i always call it creek i always call it creek too but yeah i guess some people say creek um usually very narrow like this one like this one if you met somebody it would be very hard to pass and you're about to see that now yep i'll have to pull them over that's exactly what i plan on doing well i guess they're pulling over them they beat me too they're friendlier than me and you better wait yeah you just wave to everybody and you're all right there um because it crossed back across the creek yeah no you don't because they're usually pretty low maintenance yeah um a hauler also used to be their own little communities back when the coal boom was really going on and these areas were a lot more populated sometimes the haulers had their own schools have their own churches a lot of them still have their own churches it's been maintained yeah um they always start when you get when you enter one it's called a mouthful holler yes and as you go up here you'll notice it gets more sparsely populated and spread out when there's another one that must serve people raising chickens over there so yeah that's one of the telltales but as you get up here it gets more and more spread out and sparsely populated and frankly it gets more can get more dangerous because yeah they're not as used to seeing unusual traffic yeah there might just be one or two houses up there and a lot of times people in haulers are related so if you're not recognized then they don't know what you're doing out there yeah you don't really sneak up on anybody in a holler that's for sure nope ours eyes on you for sure for sure but it's a great place to feel like you said too if a lot of times they were built by in conjunction with coal but in other 10 cases it was just a family owned a bunch of land and you know down the line a bunch of kinfolk got together yes exactly and back um in the coal company towns with the haulers they would actually separate them up by race ethnicity ethnicity i can't talk um it's been a long day it has been longer you can see it's getting dark but yeah and so they would have like a hungarian hauler and an italian hauler and yeah there's one up there i saw uh in red jacket west virginia it's a little italy and then it's just funny to think of all the ethnicities that came together and informed a lot of these haulers and then and we've seen some that the hauler names still kind of correspond with that like you see a last name and you're like oh my gosh that sounds like an italian last name for sure for sure so this is a nice little hauler this is and every time we do this there's always somebody wow that does got a fire hydrant this paved road and all that stuff well that doesn't make it any less water i'm sorry exactly most roads are paved now yeah um and if it is uh frankly if they're not paved they're a little bit more dangerous because there's so few people there exactly yeah i think that there's some kind of stipulation like if more than x number of people live on a road they keep it paved yeah and we enjoy we enjoy entertaining you folks but they also don't want to put our lives on the line exactly and to make people unnerved i don't know we're not coming out here to try to make people on edge or anything else no nothing like that a problem you see one up there you see a lot of times uh cemetery in graveyard oh yeah definitely cemetery and then you got i just heard certain things like as we saw as you come up through here too varying conditions of houses and a lot of times some of them are great and one right beside it can be burnt down and the next you know just that's just the way it is and shane you have a checklist of things that you usually see on a hot and a hauler right oh yeah he said the chickens the chickens and now somebody pointed us out and i not noticed it the last few times we've gone to them i used to say people raising chickens but now a lot of times you'll see those chickens in the road yeah a lot of times you do yeah and then the dog almost always wanted lay in the middle of the road like it on this place yeah i always say some kind of camper rv parked on the side of the road i haven't seen the dog or the camper up this one yet as soon as i started mentioning and noticing it i haven't seen a dog in the middle of the road since that's so funny but you always see people have dogs outside oh yeah but i mean i guess most people do have dogs so i mean this is getting to the point where we probably won't turn around huh yes you can just get that feeling you know what i mean yeah but it starts narrowing down it's narrowing down it's getting more rural back here and we may go a little bit around the bend here but i'm going to take you right back out too but yeah but these are videos i've been surprised how popular they are but then after i knew realized that it was like well no it doesn't surprise me at all really yeah different way of life and i noticed a lot of people ask well what is a hauler anyway so now we are telling you i know you mentioned about the mouthful hauler did you mention the headache no i didn't [Music] okay we have a little helper today so we got a third wheel but the the uh house at the top the end of the hauler is the head of the hauler yes yeah so you got the mouth of the hauler and the handle and i don't know who come up with those terms they're not like official in the encyclopedia are they there it's well-known everywhere you go everybody knows them and calls them the exact same thing yep and that was before the internet oh yeah just was just that way but a lot of people have said they thought that a hauler it was called a hauler because people would holler back and forth at each other and i've heard that they just got really good acoustics for that because it's kind of down like you said down the valley and a lot of times they were like related or whatever yeah but no it's actually a hollow and we'll talk about language sometimes the appalachian dialect but it's just that we make those sounds as er holler oh yeah and i'm glad i like it better that way yeah me too cause i was raised that way i'm sure yeah every time we call that no it's not home or it's hollow well maybe we live it's a hauler to us to hollard after you go to england and tell them that it's not a buggy it's you know whatever it's no to conform to the local costumes daddy cheese you have to say cheese again on camera yeah i guess she's taking a picture behind the scenes chase okay can you say holler kennedy hollow [Laughter] i think this is where it splits and i'm gonna turn around this one kind of branches off a lot of them don't a lot of them are just one road yeah or wind up through the mountain what are we doing we're going back to the road going back out to the mouth of the hauler yep that's right and i guarantee you somebody's took note that we're up here yo yeah see that no one repays anyone evil it's a bible verse yeah it was a bible verse on the on a tree on us on pretty neat i like that old cabinet that's neat this is very pretty i like that little this is a good example of a holler in it it is a good example yeah i know i've much felt much more endangered than other ones yeah but generally the more popular populated they are the safer you are yeah and it's not that our area appalachia is that dangerous or anything it's just you know i mean it's just like in the city if you have a building that you live in that you have to be buzzed up and you see somebody strange lurking around you know you have some questions yeah that's exactly yeah it makes it sound like we're out here and surviving in the wilds and yeah it's not like most people friendlies can be you know what your intentions are good and uh you're here with respect and you won't have hardly any problems very exactly right certainly no more so than you would anywhere else yeah so it's not like oh you go back in here and you're the wrong race or perp you know wrong out of state tag or anything else you're gonna probably know a lot depends on you as individual yes and your intention and your intentions and how you approach getting things be spring everything's looking pretty and green seeing some flowering trees bloom that's pretty lucky we didn't pass any cars right through here and look how tight this is oh no yeah that usually you can see pretty far down they would have had a driveway to pull into or something yeah this is a little windy one yeah i can see that being a little rough in the winter some ice and stuff i most of them are though okey dokey so we're getting there i was hoping to see chicken or dogging road every time i brag about like my little checklist half of it gets missed i'm gonna start making a point system for it they had a little uh cage for their trash to go in so they may have some bears up through here too it wouldn't surprise me at all yeah we're not supposed to yeah all kinds of wildlife okay well we survived the wild the wilds of the appalachian hauler yes i know i guess we told where we're at anyway this was in eastern kentucky it's in the border of lecher and pike counties so just so you know i don't know i just get some i don't know it's fun for me to drive through hello i don't know why it is i know even similarities are still just enough differences to make them all unique like this one i love like criss crosses back across that creek i know like you said that's that's more maintenance so most of them you don't see them exactly like that yeah somebody put some there's must been a really good reason for that because these are running right along this path mm-hmm flat land and that kind of thing how much flat land you have on the side of the river well we finally did it we finally explained what a hauler was didn't we we sure did once again i'm trying to be the nice guy and uh people beat me to the point they're better people than i am you know that always seems to be the case for me though whenever i get in a hauler and i'm scared i'm gonna meet somebody i'm sure i'm gonna meet somebody because i thought about it but then they're always the ones that pull over before i have time to i mean it's just this is second nature for people like that too they just have an automatic reflex okay i know where to pull over because i guarantee you if you've lived up here at all you ran into somebody at every stop along the way it's like okay i'll pull over here i'll back up into that oh my little cousin that feels more like a nephew will go get him every now and then he lives up a hauler and there's part of it that's around a curve and it's super narrow and it's at a point that if you meet anybody there one of you is going to have to back up around the bend well i'm always paranoid through there you're thinking about what your next move is going to be i'll beat you up i'm going to beat the scala punch i'm going to be the nice guy for once there's two coming actually i ain't got no hurry are you nope not at all i just hope that they don't want to need to pull in the driveway we're pulling them that'd be bad hey i just took a picture of that well that's nice here well there's the tires always talked about that guy's holding him in the back of his truck so yeah that's another thing you see in the holler somebody's got a good collection of tires somewhere yep well there's american flag that might be something we need to add to the list somebody usually got a flag out but that's probably all of appalachian yeah very patriotic very patriotic right here absolutely a lot of people go in the military in our area oh absolutely yes i know it's disproportionate to the rest of the country i've read that somewhere or i wish i could i think i've read that too especially in the south yeah a little tricky right there right now well we're about to wrap this one up and if we finally answered the age old question we keep getting asked what is a holler what is a hauler melody i think you did a good job there well thank you i had some help from you and i appreciate it all right well let's get back down the road what do you think here we'll see y'all on down the road give us thumbs up if you like this

Channel: Real Appalachia

Views: 94,731

Keywords: appalachia, appalachian mountains, appalachian holler, appalachian people, real appalachia, holler, hollow

Id: UUgUBLNEyhg

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2022