This past Seedtime Friday, June 8, 2012, saw an extra-special event take place in the Appalshop conference room.  Appalachian studies pioneer Helen Lewis, along with editors Judi Jennings and Pat Beaver joined Beth Bingman, Amelia [...]]]>

from left: Herb E. Smith, Pat Beaver, Judi Jennings, Helen Lewis, Amelia Kirby, and Sylvia Ryerson

This past Seedtime Friday, June 8, 2012, saw an extra-special event take place in the Appalshop conference room.  Appalachian studies pioneer Helen Lewis, along with editors Judi Jennings and Pat Beaver joined Beth Bingman, Amelia Kirby, and Herb E. Smith in reading selections from Helen Matthews Lewis: Living Social Justice in Appalachia, a brand-new anthology of Lewis’s writings and memories that document her life and work.

What follows is a transcript of the reading, generously sent around by Roy Silver.  For more information on the book, click here.

Helen Matthews Lewis: Living Social Justice in Appalachia

Seedtime on the Cumberland, June 8, 2012

Appalshop Conference Room, 5:00 – 6:00 pm

Helen intro: It is great to be back at Appalshop.  My relationship with this creative organization goes back to its beginning. I was teaching at Clinch Valley College in Wise when Appalshop began, and I started sending students over to get involved.  Ben Ziccafoose did the film Frank Jackson Coalminer as a term paper in my class other students came here to work: Jack Wright, Ron Short and Beth Bingman, who writes in this book about her student experiences.  I later joined the Appalshop, staff to work with Herb E., Elizabeth, Mimi and other filmmakers to develop a film series on the History of Appalachia.

This book, which was developed by Judi Jennings and Pat Beaver, is a combination of a Reader made up of a lot of things I have written throughout the years and interviews giving the context for the writings, a history of social movements and changes which I have been part of from 1950 to today and pieces by others who participated in these events.  Being in Whitesburg I need to admit that I have plagiarized two important Whitesburg writer-activists in my writings.  Both Harry Caudill  in Night Comes to the Cumberland and Tom Gish, editor of the Mountain Eagle,  wrote and talked about the region as a Colony, about the outside exploitation of the wealth and the various programs for amelioration.  Gish saw these regional organizations developing more and more like the Office of Indian Affairs, to control the natives.  He saw this as a latter stage of colonialism in which those who are left over, the land and the people, live as wards of the government on a Paleface Reservation.

I took their writings about Appalachia, and I wrote and talked about how Appalachia was like an internal colony, and I began to look at how exploitation of resources and outside control affected other people and places. I went to the coalfields of Wales and began to write about the similarities between people there and in Appalachia and the impact of extractive industries. Wales is also where I first started learning about the power of video and film to tell stories.  In our reading today, we are going to focus on two sections of the book talking about my work in Wales and Appalshop which are related and still continuing today.  We want to save time for discussion of today’s problems and what happens After Coal.

Pat: While students at Oxford, England, John Gaventa, now an internationally known scholar and activist, and Richard Greatrex did some very rough videotapes in Wales of the 1974 Miners’ Strike. When John returned to Vanderbilt University, where he was completing his studies, Helen invited him over to one of her classes at Clinch Valley College to show the tapes. John recalls that, “As happens with many people Helen meets, I became a friend and colleague on a number of projects thereafter.  I also think of Helen as a mentor in the sense of someone who inspires in others the ability to see their work differently and who helps them see new possibilities to which they can aspire.”

Helen: So [in 1975] I got a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation on energy-related research and went to Wales. . . . John Gaventa was over there. His friend Richard Greatrex, a Welsh filmmaker, agreed to do videotapes in the mining communities if I would provide him with room and board. So I piggybacked this whole Welsh videotape production on my fellowship. Most weekends John would come to Wales, and he and Richard and I would videotape Welsh community scenes.

We also used the grant for an exchange; we brought Hazel Dickens, Mike Seeger and that group of musicians—Rich Kirby, John McCutcheon, some of the Brookside mine women, Charis Horton, and people from the River Farm. It was an invasion of the Americans in this mining community where they hadn’t seen Americans since World War II.

Judi: Helen used video and visual anthropology to understand life in Welsh mining valleys. Throughout her career, Helen has been able to build such global links, but always to do so without losing her deep local and regional roots. Her work is a conversation between regional culture and global political economy. For Helen, the sociological world has always been bigger than its academic boundaries. At Clinch Valley College, she and her students engaged in the communities, not just the classroom. In her Welsh project, she used her networking skills to build links among miners, academics, and broader publics in the two regions that last to this day.

Helen: My Old Black Mountain Home” or “Deep in the Heart of Dyfed” or “What I Learned in Wild Wild Wales,” A Poem of Sorts, read at the Rose and Crown, Wales, April 24, 1976

I rented a little cottage

In Upper Brynamman on Bryn,

With Richard and John in the household

And visits from one or two friends.

We made a lot of videotapes

At schools and pubs and clubs and mines,

Of people singing, dancing and shouting a bit,

But mostly speaking their minds.

What have I done in my travels?

What have I learned in my stay?

I’ll tell you a few of the highlights

In my work, which is better called play.

I learned about lager with a bit of lime

And in the 30s it was very hard times.

A pint is larger than you think.

A pony can also be a drink.

A fiddle is not a violin.

Enjoying oneself is not a sin.

A hobble is not a funny walk.

And a chat may not be a talk.

I’ve had the greatest welcome

And made some lasting friends.

So I’ll be back for Christmas

By jet, boat or a broom in the winds.

But when I reach the U.S.A.

And “How was it?” asks my mate,

I’ll give a smile and a little wink

And say, “It was bloody great.”

Pat: When she returned from Wales, she found she had lost her office at Clinch Valley because of pressure put on the College’s administration by the coal operators she had spoken out against. She left academics and moved from the classroom to become a full-time public sociologist—perhaps sooner than she had intended, but in ways that came to her naturally. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she worked with filmmakers in Appalshop to produce a series of documentaries on the history of the region.

Helen: Appalshop started a proposal to do a series of films on the history of the region. When it was funded, I got so excited about it I decided I wanted to do that. In getting the National Endowment for the Humanities funding, Appalshop won out over several universities, a kind of landmark. Then we were able to recruit a wonderful group of scholars as our advisory committee and seriously use them. Out of that grew Strangers and Kin, the first of the history of Appalachia series.

At Appalshop I helped develop more cooperation between “the ’shop” and academics. I think I was able to help academics gain a little more understanding of Appalshop and vice versa. I became almost like a professional humanist. At times I felt like I had tattooed across my forehead HUMANIST.

Herb e: “Leading Scholar of Appalachia Leaves the Academic World to Work with Wild-Eyed Kids.” When Helen joined the Appalshop staff, we could hardly believe it. We were a bunch of young people trying to figure out how to survive while making films. Helen was an internationally known scholar and a leader in the emerging group creating Appalachian Studies. I was 29 and most of the others in the project, Marty Newell, Scott Faulkner, Elizabeth Barret, Frances Morton, and Mimi Pickering, were about the same age.

I still don’t know why she took that leap of faith from the safety of steady pay to the risky realities of making documentary films. It was a brave and unpredictable leap of faith, and I know it changed Appalshop and all of the Appalshoppers, especially me and [my wife] Elizabeth [Barret].

Helen helped us as we entered our 30’s, became parents, and wrestled with all of the challenges of being adults. [Our son] Evan was born in December 1981. Helen helped us as Elizabeth and I moved into a new phase of our lives.

Helen’s lack of self-righteousness taught us how to accept our weaknesses. Her analysis challenged us to think harder and deeper. We would say things like “mountain people are smarter, better looking, and have more fun than people from other parts of the country.” Of course, we would laugh and say things like that to be what we thought were funny. That is the nature of people in their 20’s.Helen helped us get past that kind of silliness. We knew we were playing games, but it took Helen to call our hand.

Judi: While making the connections to global political economy, Helen’s work also always comes back to interpreting and reunderstanding the role of culture. As an academic, she had communicated her insights largely through the written word, yet her experience with video in Wales and her close connections to Appalshop, also lured her to experiment with the use of film as a research and communications tool. Both of these themes came together in Strangers and Kin: A History of the Hillbilly Image

Helen: For this film, we concentrated on those periods of change and culture contact where contrasts and conflicts resulted in the emergence of stereotypes. We looked for the shifting of images from one group to another or a reversal of images for a group. In order to script the film, we decided to arrange the history of the images thematically instead of chronologically. I was reading this thing about American Indians: “American Indians have been seen as noble but doomed; enemies of progress; objects of paternalism; and models for tomorrow . . .” and I said, “That’s it. That’s it. These are the categories!” The categories fit this little box—you know, being a sociologist, I love little boxes. . . .

So we organized the images into the following categories:

1. Enemies of Progress

2. Noble but Doomed

3. Objects of Paternalism

4. Preservers of Tradition

Then we tried to write the script around those four things. Well, it got so confusing, and things were never that clear. We would find an image and we’d find a film, and we’d say, “Well is that ‘noble but doomed’ or is that ‘enemy of progress’?” It got terribly confusing, and it made a very complicated script.

That original script is a delightful script, but it had to be changed to make this film. The individual stories of the actors ended up being a major part of it. That cut out a lot of the other interviews, a lot of which I still pine for. I’m sure that’s always true of any film you make. You see these marvelous things that you wanted to keep in that went to the cutting-room floor.

I think John Gaventa said when he saw it, “You know what this is? It’s like a primitive ritual where the native puts on the mask of the oppressor and acts out the oppressor. It’s a kind of ceremony of people acting out their oppressors so that they can get control.” Whether we knew that we were doing that, I don’t know, but it can be interpreted that way.

Pat: In her role as a HUMANIST at Appalshop, Helen again crossed traditional boundaries: taking her insights as sociologist and researcher out of the classroom to much broader publics. Helen began to move from being a public sociologist, who used her knowledge to inform broader publics, to being a participatory intellectual, who used her teaching and networking skills to enable others to learn and to act for themselves.

Judi: But Helen’s work dared cross another boundary: she used her skills to enable the collective action of others. For her, sociology is not only about understanding the world, but also about changing it through redressing unjust power relations with more humane and democratic ways of knowing. It is this courage and commitment to step out of the prescribed box, to challenge the boundaries of power, that continue to inform and inspire others to step out of their boxes as well.

Beth: I met Helen when I was eight or nine. My family moved to Wise, where she lived in an apartment in an old house with big high-ceilinged rooms and a menacing Siamese cat.  Helen was an advocate and support for my decision to skip my senior year in high school and enroll at Clinch Valley College. Sociology classes with Helen and her friend Mackey Hamilton brought new ideas like “cultures” and “roles.” She also expected that we would be getting out into communities and looking carefully at what was going on.

I spent one Christmas with Helen at the Rose and Crown in Wales. Our group was welcomed in yet another of Helen’s communities. We enjoyed confounding men in the pub when we talked to each other in “Appalachian” that they could not understand.

Rich [Kirby] and I moved to Scott County [Virginia], where Helen and the Applebys [Monica and her husband Michael] had bought the River Farm. There were many, many meals with many different people around Helen’s table. Helen brought people together from wherever she met them, down the road in Dungannon or from the other side of the world. She welcomed them all. She welcomed us, and she welcomed any cat and at least one small dog.

Amelia: When I was a little girl, the most wonderful thing in the world to me was to walk across the farm to my friend Helen’s house for a visit. A cozy, magic house full of art and music and food and work.  Office flowing into kitchen into living room into porch. A wall of LPs for dancing, a shelf filled with jars of dried herbs from the garden for tea with honey, art and artifacts from her life of travel and activism for imagining…

I remember recording Christmas dedications with Helen to all of our friends for our community radio station here at Appalshop. We played Eartha Kitt’s Santa Baby over and over as we kept remembering just a couple more people we cared about that needed a holiday greeting.

I remember endless meals around the table at the River Farm, bowls brimming with food from the garden, homemade chowchow, highballs of Old Fashioneds, with heady conversation from family, neighbors, international guests, newfound strangers on the verge of becoming old friends. One of Helen’s greatest abilities is her way of bringing people together to find commonality and friendship. . . .

Beth:  From the viewpoint of home and community, one main thing we’ve learned from Helen is the importance of sharing food as a means to build community.

Amelia: She has taught us that simple, sustaining joys like cooking and gardening and good conversation are the foundation that holds up the work of radical activism. She showed us that radical activism itself takes many forms, and plays out on many arcs of time. She helped us see that Appalachia is a home worth fighting for.

Beth: With Helen, there is always another project, story, piece of work, fascinating person on the horizon or around the corner. She helps us remember that building and sustaining intersecting commitments to each other, to place, to culture, and to justice is the most important work we can do.

Helen: At a conference in Toronto, I heard Reg Crowshoe of the Peigan Nation talk about the role of the medicine bundles in the Blackfoot culture. Many of these bundles are now in museums and the tribe had to petition for the return of the bundles. Reg explained: “Our strength is in these bundles that we need today to keep our culture alive.” The bundle belongs to the Creator, but requires each keeper to take all the tribe as his or her children. The keeper encourages broad participation in the cultural life of the community. After hearing this talk by Reg Crowshoe, I wrote this poem reflecting on our attempts to preserve and revitalize Appalachian culture and communities.”

Where are our medicine bundles?

In what museum?

Buried in a landfill?

Floating in space in a satellite?

In a safe deposit box of a bank in New York City?

Was it

Lost on a Greyhound bus on the way to Detroit?

Packaged and sold in breakfast cereal?

Thrown out the window of a pick-up truck?

Where are our Elders?

Rocking on the porch?

In a nursing home?

Homeless on the streets?

Living in Florida?

Playing Bingo in Cherokee?

In prison?

Where have our communities gone?

Stripped away by a D-9 Dozer?

Moved to a free export zone?

Covered over by the shopping mall?

How do we find our bundles?

Reclaim our Elders?

Rebuild our Communities?

Some info about tonight’s bands will follow, but [...]]]> Happy Thursday Morning to all of you folks out there, and Happy Seedtime!  The festival starts TONIGHT, June 7, with a very special edition of WMMT’s long-running live performance bluegrass series (the best live performance radio this side of WSM, if you must know), Bluegrass Express Live!

Some info about tonight’s bands will follow, but first–if you’re on your way here, Welcome to Whitesburg!  Here’s a history of our fair festival.  Here also are some local lodging options (if you’re planning to camp, do not forget that Wiley’s Last Resort is the official campground of Seedtime 2012), as well as driving directions from various localities nearby.  Here are some local things-to-do.

We also are still in need of volunteers to help make the weekend go, so here’s some info on what we need help with.  If you are interested in helping make this festival go this weekend, we would appreciate it so very much!  For questions or information of any sort, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.  Our phone number at WMMT is (606) 633-0108, and our email is wmmtfm@appalshop.org.

Now, some info about tonight’s bands:

Normally at BGX, if we have an opening band in addition to our headliner, the opening band gets a short set while the headliner plays a longer, two-set show.  We’re so excited about both of our groups on Thursday, however, that both The Tommy Webb Band and Heather Berry & Tony Mabe will receive equal time and equal billing!

Some information on the two artists that will kick off Seedtime 2012:

The Tommy Webb Band

The Tommy Webb Band is an Eastern Kentucky-based bluegrass band that has been winning fans both here at home and across the country since their founding in 2005.  They have released four full-length albums, including the 2011 release From Rock n’ Roll to Bill Monroe.  The album, and its title track especially, became a favorite here at WMMT quickly after its release, and has spent a great deal of time charting among the top 35 bluegrass albums nationwide.  Webb is a Floyd County (Ky.) native, and we’re thrilled to bring him and his band back to the Appalshop stage for a performance close to home.

Heather Berry & Tony Mabe

Heather Berry is a Virginia native who combines lovely, affected, “song-bird” vocal work with Mother Maybelle-style arch-top guitar accompaniment to create a captivating mixture of bluegrass and folk.  She is accompanied by the versatile Tony Mabe, who plays everything from the autoharp to the mandolin to the guitar to both Scruggs and clawhammer-style banjo.  The couple have recently signed with Mountain Fever records and have just put out a brand new record, the self-titled Heather Berry & Tony Mabe Show, as well as a single, “Walk Slow,” which quickly became a hit here at WMMT.

We couldn’t be more excited to be able to have both The Tommy Webb Band and Heather Berry & Tony Mabe kick off the 2012 Seedtime festival.  Just as with every BGX Live!, the show begins at 7:30!  For more information, call WMMT today at (606) 633-0108 or email us at wmmtfm@appalshop.org.  As always, tickets are $15 / $5 for students and kids.  See you tonight!

The primitive campground at the end of the whirled.

6.3 miles from the Appalshop high atop the majestic Pine Mountain!

WLR is a private nature & wildlife preserve near Whitesburg in Letcher County on top of Pine Mountain, the second highest mountain in Kentucky.

The Pine Mountain Trail Linear [...]]]> The Official Campground of Seedtime 2012

The primitive campground at the end of the whirled.

6.3 miles from the Appalshop high atop the majestic Pine Mountain!

WLR is a private nature & wildlife preserve near Whitesburg in Letcher County on top of Pine Mountain, the second highest mountain in Kentucky.

The Pine Mountain Trail Linear State Park passes through the Resort and The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come Trail entrance is across the US 119. The Resort is bordered by the 3000 acre Bad Branch Falls Nature Preserve and is 3.7 miles from the Bad Branch parking area.

The Resort is dedicated to making the world a little bit better place, the preservation & perpetuation of wildife, music, poetry, fun, fol-de-rol and communing with Nature.

For directions and other info go to www.wileyslastresort.com.

Appalshop Theater

Saturday, June 9th, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Dr. Pen, a founding member of the Appalachian Association of Sacred Harp Singers, will be teaching Seedtime participants the American singing tradition known as “shape note singing.” This musical style, often called “Sacred Harp” singing, is [...]]]>

Dr. Ron Pen of the University of Kentucky

Appalshop Theater

Saturday, June 9th, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Dr. Pen, a founding member of the Appalachian Association of Sacred Harp Singers, will be teaching Seedtime participants the American singing tradition known as “shape note singing.” This musical style, often called “Sacred Harp” singing, is a type of sight-reading harmonization that is a rich part of American heritage. Dr. Pen’s workshop will be open to everyone willing to participate and will include some background history and social context for the music. No musical experience necessary.

7 PM, Saturday, June 9th

The Annual Seedtime Youth Bored Punk Show Featuring:

They Yearn For What They Fear http://theyyearnforwhattheyfear.bandcamp.com/ Globsters (seedtime favorite) http://www.karmicswamp.org/2012/03/ks13-globsters-rock-and-roll-misery-7.html

Equine Influenza Crucial jams from Harrodsburg.

Masters Of The Apocalypse Nathan Hall & John Haywood are going to riff ya brain out.

$5 donation for [...]]]> @ the Boone Motor Building

7 PM, Saturday, June 9th

The Annual Seedtime Youth Bored Punk Show Featuring:

They Yearn For What They Fear
http://theyyearnforwhattheyfear.bandcamp.com/

Globsters
(seedtime favorite)
http://www.karmicswamp.org/2012/03/ks13-globsters-rock-and-roll-misery-7.html

Equine Influenza
Crucial jams from Harrodsburg.

Masters Of The Apocalypse
Nathan Hall & John Haywood are going to riff ya brain out.

$5 donation for bands.

Punx Flea Market will start at @ 4:00pm
FREE TO SET UP

Anyone can set up and sale junk…….

Saturday, June 9th at 9 PM

Admission: Free

Experience Kentucky’s longest continuing community square dance at Seedtime on the Cumberland! The Carcassonne Community Square Dance will hold it’s June dance under the main stage tent on the Appalshop Grounds during this year’s festival.

The Carcassonne Community Center was built as the Carcassonne [...]]]> Appalshop Grounds

Saturday, June 9th at 9 PM

Admission: Free

Experience Kentucky’s longest continuing community square dance at Seedtime on the Cumberland! The Carcassonne Community Square Dance will hold it’s June dance under the main stage tent on the Appalshop Grounds during this year’s festival.

The Carcassonne Community Center was built as the Carcassonne School in 1924. After a fire destroyed the original structure, it was rebuilt in it’s current form in 1931. It functioned as a school for the students of Letcher County, Kentucky until the 1960′s and on a limited basis into the seventies. It is famous for it’s quilting club and The Carcassonne Square Dance, the longest continuous community square dance in Kentucky. Set somewhat in-between Hazard and Whitesburg, the old school building that houses the center lies in a secluded area amid hills and trees in Letcher County. It features the best old-time musicians Kentucky has to offer as well as food and hospitality for attendees learning and performing traditional square dance.

People from the community of Carcassonne have danced at several Kentucky Folklife Festivals and were featured on the Mall in Washington, D.C. at the 2003 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

Enjoy this film produced by local students Matthew Baily, T.J. Boggs, and Chasity Watts for Appalshop’s Appalachian Media Institute.

Castle of the Mountains: The Carcassonne Community Center

…and this original music video by Appalshop filmmaker Herb E. Smith, filmed at the Carcassonne Community Center.

Whoa Mule