Eric Gettings did a great job recording the oral histories and music. I also don’t want to forget Wade Spees, a wonderful photographer now based in Charleston, S. C., who was on the road with me when we met some of these folks. We had a blast.
An early UMW organizer. Mine tragedy survivors. A bootlegger. Coal camp baseball players. A horse trader. A girl born during the deadly Appalachian flood of 1977. A female furrier who carves muskrats while eating peanut-butter sandwiches. Music. And more.
Some of these stories chronicle events that happened 60 or more years ago. It follows that most of these men and women who told them have been dead a long time. As Mathews says in the introduction, “You just don’t find these folks any more.”This CD project gives new life to these tales from a bygone era. Copies are being furnished to public and school libraries in southern West Virginia and southwest Virginia as well as to regional historians and colleges and universities that offer programs in Appalachian studies.
In 1972, I left my hometown of Abingdon, Va., for the 80-mile drive to my first newspaper job in Bluefield, W. Va. I was greener than the keys on the manual typewriters.
When you find a woman who used to sleep with a pet bobcat and who eats her lunch while skinning a raccoon, there is no doubt you've met a certifiable fur trader. That's Mrs. Archie Caldwell.
"I can lob an old Pocahontas Fuel Company pop bottle over that hill just as pretty as you please. If I put enough gun powder behind it, I could fire a round over a mile, I reckon." - John Stout
Hear an original song about the route between Huntington, W. Va., and Bluefield, W. Va. written by MaryAnne Mathews.