"Sacramental Spaces: The Salvaged World of Raymond Barnhart" by William Howard Cohen

The photo above is an official Alice Lloyd College yearbook photo of William Howard Cohen.  

William Howard Cohen was a college professor, poet, and mentor to many young, aspiring writers wherever he lived and worked, Kentucky, Florida, Illinois.  I have written about Bill Cohen and his poetry more than once on this blog and was very pleasantly surprised to see others who had been mentored by Bill Cohen respond very favorably to his writing and his encouragement and criticism of their writing.  William Howard Cohen was an internationally recognized expert on Haiku and served as the American Cultural Delegate in the area of poetry at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. Cohen was also an outspoken and highly effective environmental advocate who fought bravely and well against strip mining in Appalachia.  If you read the comments section at the end of this blog post about William Howard Cohen, you will see that this man was not just a writer who spent his time sitting in a cloister somewhere writing.  He also spent a great deal of that time teaching, training, mentoring and encouraging young writers whom he met as a result of his books, teaching, poetry readings, and attendance at other events. 

 The photo above is William Howard Cohen and his wife, Delores Cohen, at Alice Lloyd College about 1968 or so.  

William Howard Cohen also made a conscious effort to constantly improve his knowledge of art in all its form and frequently attended exhibitions of painting and sculpture wherever he might be traveling.  The book we are discussing here, "Sacramental Spaces: The Salvaged World of Raymond Barnhart", contains twenty-one poems which Cohen produced and published after attending an exhibition somewhere of the work of Barnhart.  It is a very difficult piece of Cohen's work to locate on used book websites and was apparently issued as a small, self-published book, perhaps printed by Pippa Valley Printing in Knott County Kentucky  where Cohen was teaching at Alice Lloyd College at the time.  Amazingly, the one copy of the book which I have been able to locate is autographed by Raymond Barnhart himself and I found it at a used books and collectible store in California which sells items through one of the large used book clearinghouses online.  According to the blog "Litterata": 

 "In his youth, Raymond Barnhart worked as a riverboat deck-hand, carpenter, fruitpacker, and window designer before becoming an artist. A painter during the first half of his life, Barnhart received his MFA from Ohio State University, and he was an instructor at the University of Kentucky for 32 years before leaving and moving to California in 1958."  (Litterata Blog, available May 30, 2021, at 7:15am) 

That blog post, if you read it, will show you that the blogger was highly impressed by the assemblage sculptures which Barnhart produced as were many others including William Howard Cohen who most likely  saw and exhibition of Barhhart's work at the University of Kentucky where he he taught for several years before leaving for California where he died in 1996 at the age of 93.  My recent acquisition of William Howard Cohen's little book of poetry and the creation of this blog post are both quite timely since there is an ongoing exhibition of collage and assemblage which contains at least some pieces of the work of Raymond Barnhart at the University of Kentucky Art Museum at 405 Rose Street on the UK campus. I will attend that exhibition since it runs until July 10, 2021.  The museum website does state that they are operating under Covid 19 restrictions and do require hourly reservations for visitors.  But, admission is free.  I will be attending that exhibition and so should you, IF YOU ARE FULLY VACCINATED!  

The phot above is William Howard Cohen, far right with beard, Kenneth Baldridge, and four unknown Alice Lloyd College students. 

Now that we know who Raymond Barnhart is, let's actually address the primary reason for this blog post, the poetry of William Howard Cohen which is contained in his ode to Raymond Barnhart.  This collection contains 21 poems all of which were inspired by the art of Raymond Barnhart.  Each of the poems appears to have been motivated by a single work by Barnhart although it is possible one or two could have been inspired by an overall exhibition of the artists work.  Barnhart created his assemblage pieces by using found objects and, if we refer once again to the "Litterata" blog piece about him we learn that: 

"While teaching a design and wood sculpture class in Mill Valley, and from his contacts with the Bauhaus novement, Barnhart found his true medium: assemblage. His assemblage work is classical in the sense of composition, aesthetics, and design. From the Conceptualists, he incorporated the use of found objects. And he made a just marriage of it.  But whereas Conceptualists diverged, exploring man's alienation in society, Barnhart's work is full of hope and compassion: it reflects the linear sentiments of art, beauty, balance, harmony; it transmorgifies limitation as set in stone by various art movements: it remains unswerving in its devotion to the aesthetics of art.  Wind-blasted, sun-bleached, and burnt materials juxtaposed against man-made rusted and tarnished discards become the poetry of deserted places. Fellow Sonoma County artist John Kessel said, "Raymond Barnhart assembles diverse, objects to create visual poems that evoke either man's place in nature—or man in contemplation before nature. Some pieces tell a story, and all are poems which convey an impact. This is an art of redemption and reconciliation." Litterata Blog, Available May 30, 2021, at 7:15am)

Both William Barnhart and William Howard Cohen believed that nothing should be wasted.  In the 1960's when I knew Bill Cohen, he was already involved in the very early effort to save the earth, the natural environment, and wasted nothing of value.  Barnhart created his art from the things others had thrown away.  It was no surprise that William Howard Cohen would have been inspired by the works of Barnhart and would have written a little book of poetry to commemorate that work.  These 21 poems are all short and, as a person who has read and studied much, if not most, of the work of William Howard Cohen, this little book contains some of the best of his short poems.  As an internationally respected expert on Haiku, William Howard Cohen practiced economy of language.  He wasted few words in his poetry and this poetry is a fine example of that economy of language.  One of my favorite poems is called 

      "Monument" 

The burnt pylons of time

Rise Heavenward-

The skeletal heart

Rides the air midway

      Suspended

Between the finite

     and the infinite. (William Howard Cohen, "Sacramental Spaces...")

That poem paints a myriad of pictures in our minds as we read it.  We see images left by old fires rising into the air. are they burnt timbers or are they really old highway pylons used in a Barnhart assemblage?  This brief poem, only seven lines, twenty-one words, a minimal amount of utterances on the keys of typewriter are what economy of language is all about.  There are only four more words in that poem than in a traditional Haiku and, while the poem is not Haiku, it is reminiscent of some of the best of Haiku.  It is William Howard Cohen at his best.   

Another of my favorite poems from the book is "World Of Raymond Barnhart" which contains only sixteen words, one less than in a traditional Haiku: 

"World Of Raymond Barnhart"

From the broken shards of time

Rainbows of eternity; 

From the charred shells of earth

Universes.  (William Howard Cohen, "Sacramental Spaces...")

It is always a pleasure to read the work of William Howard Cohen and this little book is an especial pleasure since it has also led me to learn about the work of a man artist whom my old friend and mentor, Bill Cohen, admired.  I hope you can locate a copy of "Sacramental Spaces: The Salvaged World Of Raymond Barnhart".  You will enjoy it.  If you cannot locate a copy of this apparently small edition collection, then consider finding and reading the two books by William Howard Cohen which are more easily located, "The Hill Way Home" and "A House In The Country: Poems From Southern Illinois".  They are both well worth reading.  

"Death and Dying in Central Appalachia: Changing Attitudes Practices" by James K. Crissman--Book Review

 

This book was published by The University of Illinois Press in 1994 which means that it is somewhat dated in terms of changing attitudes and practices in the Appalachian region.  But no one has published an adequate book since this one was released to account for any changes in the intervening 27 or so years.  The only book I know of which comes close is "Decoration Day In The Mountains" by Alan Jabbour and Karen Singer Jabbour and it is directed only toward the practices of decorating graves and cemeteries and not toward the entire broad spectrum of how death, dying, burials, grave digging, funerals, memorial services, and numerous other aspects of how we, as a people with one of the most unique cultures in the entire country, deal with our dead.  Until another author produces a book of this quality and depth of research which covers the entire width, depth, and breadth of the field, this is the book most likely to give the best answers to any interested person about death and dying in Central and Southern Appalachia.  I have mentioned this book at times in several other blog posts on this blog but I have never written an entire blog post about it and, in that respect, I have been remiss.  Due to the fact that it was published by a major academic press, there are usually a few good used copies available at one or more of the large used book websites on the internet and it is well worth buying for the serious student of Appalachian Studies or the avid reader who is simply interested in any aspect of the book.  

The author, James K. Crissman, did a well researched, scholarly job of discussing nearly every aspect of death and dying in the area of Central and Southern Appalachia in the slightly more than 200 pages of this book.  His bibliography and notes are exemplary in both their volume and precision and he supplemented his writing with numerous photographs throughout the book.  The one shortcoming of the photographs is that they are all in black and white.  The book is comprised of an Introduction, ten chapters and a Summary.  Chapter topics include Familism, Neighborliness, and the Death Watch; Preparation of the Body; Burial Receptacles and Grave Digging; The Wake; The Funeral Service; Burial Customs; Grave Markers and Other Forms of Memorialization; Funeralizing and Memorial Traditions; Dying, Death, and Central Appalachian Music; and Mining Disasters and Death.  All of these chapter topics are important and many aspects of all of them have changed in some ways over the course of the nearly thirty years since this book was published.  

If we look briefly at some few aspects of most of these chapters we can get some general idea of how these aspects of death and dying in Appalachia have changed.  Firstly, let's look at the top of Familism which is a word many readers may not fully understand.  Familism is a concept from sociology which amounts to somewhat of a double edged sword for the people who practice it in their lives.  But it is less widespread in Appalachia today than it might have been thirty to fifty to one hundred years ago.  Familism occurs when members of a family, especially an extended family, have deep ties to the family and to each other.  Familism is a bit of a double edged sword.  It means that a second cousin might take a day off work to drive his cousin to a doctor's appointment or to help her move.  It also means that family members and families can become negatively enmeshed to such a degree that fights can occur over very minor points and, yet, two family members who have been in disagreement for months will spring to the defense of each other if an outsider comes in conflict with one of them.  Neighborliness is now less likely to result in extensive assistance being provided by neighbors in the event of a death than happened in the past.  Today, death watches in Appalachia usually involve only family members or close friends with an occasional involvement by a church member or co-worker.  In the past, it would not have been uncommon for neighbors to visit at least once daily to offer sympathy and assistance as a person was approaching death.  Preparation of the body for burial in Appalachia in this day and age is almost always performed by undertakers, embalmers, and their assistants in a funeral home.  Even in my childhood, it was much more common for female family members, close neighbors, or "granny women" to come to the home of the deceased and wash and dress a dead person for burial.  I am nearly seventy years old and I can only remember one person in Appalachia who was buried unembalmed in a shroud. But I do know of several who have been buried, at their request, unembalmed and dressed in everyday clothes instead of the now common fancy burial dresses and suits. But I do remember the Old Regular Baptist preacher Clabe Mosley who was buried in a homemade casket which he bought, paid for, and tested for fit almost a quarter of a century before his death at 102.  Clabe was also buried under a concrete homemade tombstone which one of his sons constructed to Clabe's specifications.   I also remember seeing graves dug for the old, cheap, wooden caskets which were buried without a  vault.  In those situations, the grave was dug in two different widths, a close fit for the casket in the bottom two feet of the grave, then the top three or so feet was dug with a step outward on all four sides of about six inches so that boards of rough, hardwood lumber could be laid over the casket to help retard the eventual rotting of the casket and body along with subsequent sinking of the grave. Today, cremation is much more common in Central and Southern Appalachia than ever before.  At the time Crissman wrote this book, almost no one in Appalachia was being cremated. When I was young, almost no one was ever buried in a grave which anyone had been paid to dig and graves were always dug by hand.  Now, almost all graves in Appalachia are dug by a backhoe and it is truly rare to see neighbors, family, or friends perform the grave digging service as a sign of respect for the dead.  

Today, nearly all funerals in Appalachia are held in a funeral home and it is incredibly rare to see a home based funeral where the body is brought home and a visitation and church service is held nightly for up to three days which is how most of my family members were funeralized until about 1980.  Grave markers have changed drastically in my lifetime.  When I was young, it was possible to still see a few people who were buried with only a sandstone or rough lumber marker and that changed in my childhood to markers being primarily either professional granite or marble tombstones with carving on them.  Double tombstones for married couples and occasionally a parent and child were also the norm and that is still common.  In my early years, nearly everyone was buried in a small, privately owned family cemetery.  That is far less common today.  The majority of people are now buried in commercial cemeteries although family cemeteries have not disappeared completely.  Many, if not most, of the commercial cemeteries now require that markers be made of bronze and lie level with the surface of the ground so the entire cemetery can be mowed with a riding lawn mower or tractor without the operator or an additional laborer ever being required to move flowers and other decorations or stop and**** get off the mower.  Most also have strict rules about how decorations such as flowers may be used on graves.  Up until about twenty years ago, all tombstones were simply engraved with names and dates of birth and death along with one short phrase such as "Asleep In Jesus", "Gone Home", or the like.  Today, it is common to see laser decorated tombstones with very complicated scenes which may be purely artistic in nature or copied digitally from a photograph.  

Lastly, mine deaths and disasters are less common than they were in 1994 when Crissman wrote his chapter about them.  They are not totally non-existent today and I cannot remember the last occasion when coal miners were permanently entombed in a mine due to the extreme danger of further deaths of recovery workers if attempts were made to remove dead bodies after an explosion.  Crissman devoted an entire chapter in his excellent book to that subject and it deserved to be addressed at that time.  Now, most attempts to address that topic have become historical in nature due to the steady lessening of mine deaths both due to mechanization and decreased underground mining.  

James K. Crissman produced one of the best books in the entire field of Appalachian Studies with this book.  It should always be included in any attempt to create a broad personal library of Appalachian books.  The subject of death, dying, and burial practices in Appalachia should never be addressed without including a discussion of this book.  It is masterpiece.  If you haven't read it and consider yourself a student of life in Appalachia you should read it. 

The Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists--Trends In Membership Over The Last 80 Years

This blog post has been prompted by what I have observed over the last thirty or so years to be a steady, but slight, decrease in the numbers of both members and member churches of the various associations of churches which refer to themselves as "Old Regular Baptist".  My mother was a member of the Steele's Creek Church of the Old Regular Baptists from some time about 1950 until her death in 1970.  Since her death and the death of the long term moderator of that church, E. Hawk Moore, along with other members and regular attendees at that church, there was a steady decrease in members until finally the church was dissolved by the New Salem Association of which it was a member church and the church property was sold to a private owner who now leases the building to a private corporation which uses it as a day treatment center for the mentally ill or mentally disabled.  Quite fortuitously, I was able to meet that owner and he graciously gave me the sign from the front of the church which had never been removed at the time the church was dissolved.  Let me state for the record that the Steele's Creek Church was not a member of the Indian Bottom Association and I know of no connection between that church and the Indian Bottom Association other than the possibility that some minister who might have been connected to the Steele's Creek Church could have been a delegate to the Indian Bottom Association meeting at some time since several associations which refer to themselves as Old Regular Baptist do have some form of limited fellowship between associations and often send delegates to the association meetings of corresponding associations.  I should also note for the record that I am not and have never been a member of any Old Regular Baptist Church and I should never be confused with the Old Regular Baptist preacher Roger Hicks.  I am simply interested in their history, as I am in nearly every other aspect of the history of Central and Southern Appalachia, since they were a part of my family's life and I have known of them all my life.  

Among the many associations in Central and Southern Appalachia which refer to themselves as Old Regular Baptists are The New Salem Association, The Northern New Salem Association, The Burning Springs Association (1813), Red Bird Association (1823), Mountain Association (1856), Red River Association (1876) The Mud River Association (1888), Twin Creek Association, Spencer Association (1898), Sandy Creek Association, Washington Association, Three Forks of Powell Valley Association, The Philadelphia Association, Ketocton Association, Yadkin, Holston, Kehukee and Roaring River. Associations. This list is likely to be somewhat incomplete and I would recommend anyone who is interested in learning more about the Old Regular Baptist churches and their numerous independent associations to read Howard Dorgan's excellent, but somewhat aged, book "The Old Regular Baptists of Central Appalachia: Brothers and Sisters in Hope".  Any attempt to study all of the various associations is a complex and time consuming effort and I suspect that is a major factor in the fact that so few academic books have been published about any of these associations.  Thankfully, the Old Regular Baptists have historically produced an annual report of vital statistics, obituaries, and circular letters which is the best source of information about any particular association. These annual reports are referred to as the "Minutes" of each particular association and have always been a rarity among the majority of small Appalachian churches most of which maintain very few written records.  But the major drawback to that route of research is that no central depository exists for the Minutes of all the associations.  The University of Pikeville has the best collection I know of but even that one is markedly incomplete.  Thankfully, the Indian Bottom Association made a decision with the advent of the internet to place all their "Minutes" online.  I would have loved this writing to have been able to compare membership and total church numbers for at least two or three associations over the same time period but I do not have adequate access to a sufficient number of Minutes over such an extended period of time.  For that reason, this blog post can only effectively examine the membership trends in the Indian Bottom Association.  But it is likely that the other associations will have had similar trends in membership and church numbers to the Indian Bottom Association. 

I will be comparing total membership numbers and total church numbers in the Indian Bottom Association from 1939 to 2019 in ten year increments since it would be a task of book length to compare those numbers year by  year for even fifty years.  I want to begin in a year prior to World War II for two reasons, firstly, because that war changed the face of much of rural America since it sent hundreds of thousands of rural men, and quite a few women in supportive services, to Europe and Asia and exposed them to a vastly different world than the one in which they grew up.  Secondly, I would like to be able to make an educated conclusion as to whether or not a sizeable number of those young Appalachian men and women who returned alive from World War II had been affected by the war in a manner which would have caused them to have what are commonly called "salvation experiences" and to join the churches of their parents after their return.  

In 1939, there were 27 documented churches in the Indian Bottom Association which had recorded a total of 1328 members.   Three churches had more than 100 members with two more having membership in the high 90's.  The largest church was the Big Cowan Church with 138 members.  Big Cowan Church was located in Whitesburg in Letcher County Kentucky.  Carr's Fork and Poor Fork were the other two churches with 100 or more member at that time.  Carr's Fork was located on Carr Creek in Knott County Kentucky and Poor Fork was located near Cumberland, Kentucky, in Harlan County. 

When we go to the 1949 "Minutes", we see that there were then 30 churches in the Indian Bottom Association which represents an increase of 3 member churches over the ten year period which is an 11% increase over the 1939 statistics.  The total membership in those 30 churches was 1634 which represents a sizeable increase of 306 members which is an increase of slightly more than 23% in total membership in the association over the ten year period following World War II.  There is no available way to determine how many of those 306 new members might have been returning veterans but it is likely that a significant number of them were such men and perhaps a few women who were also veterans of some war related service such as nursing, hospital work, or office work at established military bases.  There were then, in 1949, five churches in the association which had more than 100 members each with the Big Cowan Church remaining the largest with 167 members.  That reflects an increase of 29 members in the Big Cowan Church which is slightly more than a 21% increase in membership over the ten year period.  Poor Fork, Oven Fork, Big Cowan, Doty Creek, and Little Home were the five churches with at least 100 members.  Carr's Fork had dropped out of the list of churches with at least 100 members and was down to 95.  Big Cowan still led the numbers with the aforestated 167 members, an increase of 29 members over the ten year period which represented an increase of 21% in membership. 

In the 1959 "Minutes", we find that total membership in the association had dropped to 1377 members which is a significant decrease over the ten year period and is very close to the numbers at the beginning of this research in 1939.  The total loss in membership is 257 members for a percentage of 15.7% over that  ten year period from 1949 to 1959.  The total number of churches in 1959 remained stable at 30.  

The 1969 "Minutes" showed a total membership of 785 members which is very significant drop in membership from 1959 when the total was 1377 members.  The total membership loss was 592 members for a 42.9% drop in membership which would be shocking in any respected institution in a stable community.  The Statistical Table only shows a total of 21 churches in the association which seems to indicate that 9 of the member churches had chosen to leave the association over the preceding ten years.  The most logical reason for such a departure in members and member churches would be that there had been some major dispute of doctrine which led the 9 churches and most of their members to leave the association.  It is also significant that no church in the association reported having a hundred members.  The largest was now New Home Church with 82 members.  A handful of the churches were now reporting less than 20 members.  

The 1979 "Minutes", as entered into the internet website does not contain a Statistical Table page which appears to be an error of some sort since no association of which I have ever known failed to include the Statistical Table in their annual "Minutes".  Because of that error, I have chosen to revert for this time period to the 1978 "Minutes" which will make this period of examination 9 years instead of 10.  For the next reporting period, I will revert back to what would have been the normal year to examine, 1989,which will make that period of examination 11 years.  The 1978 "Minutes" shows 916 total members which is a significant increase over the 785 members reported 9 years before in 1969. That represents a 16.6% increase in total membership over the 9 year period.  But the 1979 "Minutes" shows only 20 member churches which represents a loss of 1 member church during that 9 year period.  The usual reasons still hold true for the loss of a member church and would usually be due to either a loss of membership which caused a church to be dissolved or that the missing church left the association to either become an independent church or to join another Old Regular Baptist Association.  It is most likely that a church's departure with active members would have been due to doctrinal disputes.  It should also be noted that the church structure in Old Regular Baptist churches does not utilize a system of pastors or paid ministers of any kind.  Each church has a Moderator, Assistant  Moderator, and Church Clerk.  The Moderator is not a complete example of a "pastor" and that word would never be used in an ORB church.  The Moderator is responsible for running the monthly weekend of meetings, supervising care of the building, preaching or at least "opening" the services but does not function in a truly "pastoral" capacity. 

The 1989 "Minutes" shows a total of 1323 members and a total of 26 churches which is a significant increase in both membership and member churches.   That is a total of 407 new members over the 11 year period and an increase of 6 member churches.  The percentage of increase in membership is 44.4%.  The 5 new churches represents an increase in member churches of 25 percent.  I suspect that some of those member churches arose out of the Great Migration of Appalachian mountain people who moved to the industrial north to work and took their particular form of religion with them.  The church clerks list shows one in Ohio and one in Indiana which has been a common theme with the New Salem Association also and actually brought about the creation of the Northern New Salem Association in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and one or two other industrial Midwestern states.  But  I also suspect there could be other sociological reasons for such an increase in both the church members and the member churches.  Once again, I have arrived at a question which cannot be completely answered in the time I have to devote to this research and it is exacerbated by the lack of comparative data from the other associations.  

The 1999 "Minutes" reports a total membership of 1893 total members and a total of 42 member churches.  Both these increases over the 10 year period are remarkable.  They could be due to further movement of members and their families to the industrial north but that is unlikely.  It seems to me that the more likely answer would be that another small association may have disbanded and those churches decided to join the Indian Bottom.  An increase of 16 new churches in such a small association over that time period is unlikely.  The 16 churches represent a 61% increase in member churches.  The total increase in members is 570 members which represents a 43% increase in total membership and the total membership in the association had doubled over the previous 20 years.  That is truly astounding and it shatters my original supposition that the association would have had significant losses in membership over the time period.  

The 2009 "Minutes" reported 1876 total members is virtually identical to the 1893 members 10 years before.  The drop in membership of only 17 members in a total population of nearly 2,000 is statistically insignificant at .00898%.  A total of 47 member churches were reported in 2009 which indicates that average membership per individual church is dropping.  The new churches, 5 in total, represent an increase of 11.9% in total churches.  Although I had not been computing average membership in the churches over the entire examination, let's look at that for this two reports.  In 1999, the average membership per single church was slightly more than 45 members.  In 2009, the average membership per single church was down to 39 average members a drop of 6 members per congregation which represents a drop of 13.3% per individual congregation.  

The 2019 "Minutes" only two  years ago reported total membership in the association of 1595 members for a drop in membership of 281 members which represents a drop in membership of 14,9% and is also significantly less than it was 20 years before.  There are only 43 total member churches reported in 2019 for a drop of 4 member churches which is a drop of 8.5%.  The total average membership per local congregation has also dropped to 37members which is another drop of 2 members per congregation.  While everything I suspected to learn by examining these membership data in the Indian Bottom Association did not hold true, I did learn the total membership in the congregation had a significant increase in membership following World War II which was followed by a slow decline in membership which was temporarily reversed in the ten years between 1989 and 1999.  I still suspect that sizeable increase was probably due to other churches and their entire congregations deciding to join the association.  But after that increase, the next 20 years shows a reversion to the slow, steady decrease in membership while at the same time showing an increase in member churches which is offset by a drop in total average membership per congregation.  I am too overloaded with other projects to attempt a full year by year analysis of the numbers.  But it would be very educational to see some good statistician and researcher do that very project with a book in mind about that and other aspects of the various associations of Old Regular Baptist churches.  Howard Dorgan's excellent book was published 20 years ago and a follow up is long overdue. 

Watauga County, NC, Has Lost An Important Cultural Asset

The image above is a print of a painting of the 100 plus year old home in which the greatest Appalachian storyteller Ray Hicks spent nearly his entire life.  The original painting was called "Ray's Moon" by Bob Timberlake and depicts the house which was located on Old Mountain Road above Banner Elk, North Carolina and stood for 121 years until the wee hours of the morning of Tuesday, May 25, 2021, when it was burned to the ground in a fire whose origin is so far unknown.  Although Ray Hicks died on April 20, 2003, and his wife Rosie died on January 31, 2014, it was reported by HCPress that the Hicks family still owned the house and the farm on which it was located.  The photograph belows is of Ted Hicks, the son of Ray Hicks, and the old house as it was when the family was living in it.  Ray Hicks' children were at least the third generation to live in the house.  

This old house was much more than a house.  It was a symbol of the North Carolina High Country lifestyle of self-sufficiency, farming, herb gathering, instrument making, story telling, and subsistence farming which the Hicks family and their neighbors had practiced for at least 200 years.  The house and its loquacious owner have been immortalized in books by Robert Isbell, Thomas Burton, Shannon Hitchcock, Christine Pavesic, and Owen Smith. It had also been the scene of several video recordings of Ray Hicks practicing the Appalachian storytelling for which he was the acknowledged grand master for the majority of his life. Several of those recorded stories and/or interviews are still available on YouTube. I have been fascinated by the life and story telling of Ray Hicks for less time than I should have been.  I only became interested in his works over the course of the last year or so and began to read books about him and his wife Rosie secondary to having studied the work of Leonard Roberts, who was also a great storyteller, collector, and author in his own right.  But, Ray Hicks was the man other Appalachian story tellers tried to emulate and always came up short in the effort.  

Sherrie Norris of High Country Press wrote the best report of the tragic fire which consumed the Hicks home on the morning of May 25, 2021, and that story can be found on the High Country Press web page.  But their web service is not very conducive to links in other articles or websites and her article is best found with an independent Google Search  using some phrase such as "Ray Hicks Home Burns".  I will quote some from Ms. Norris' excellent, highly personal, and very well written article because her appreciation for and love of Ray Hicks, his stories, and the old house shine through that article in a way which anyone who did not personally benefit from knowing Ray could never equal.  Early in the article, Sherrie Norris says this: 

"Many of us who were “lucky enough” will carry memories for our lifetime of climbing the curves to Old Mountain Road, looking out over the expansive, majestic view of four states, as Hicks often pointed out, and descending the worn pathway down to the place he called home."

Ms. Norris' article also makes it apparent that her love of the place included the house, the farm, the surroundings, and the lifestyle which Ray Hicks and his family had practiced for many years and continued to practice long after many others around them had abandoned that lifestyle.  

"Built by his grandfather, the house stood as a shrine of sorts, welcoming guests for decades from near and far. Whether we sat on the steps of the porch beside the woodpile, on the woodpile, in a ladder-back chair, or inside the house around the old wood stove — in awe of the unique father of Jack Tales himself — visitors were entertained and captivated, all at once. Even after his death, his closest followers gathered at the house in his honor several times in an effort to keep his memory alive.  When he died in 2003 at the age of 80, Hicks left behind a legacy that will not soon be forgotten."

Importantly, Ray Hicks' legacy was built of far more than the old house and that legacy will survive.  But the house was an important part of Ray Hicks and that legacy.  The old house with its ever present woodpile on the porch, the old cane bottom chairs for the frequent visitors who came to sit at Ray's feet and listen to his tales, and that old wood burning stove which Ray had uniquely crafted in the living room to heat the massive, old, poorly insulated house, were all a part of the total picture presented by the lanky 6' 7" Ray Hicks whose favorite way to spend time was passing on the Jack Tales and other stories he had learned and preserved in his 80 years on Beech Mountain.  In addition to preserving the tales he had heard during his formative years, there are also dozens of stories which Ray created in his own right.  

Ray Hicks was a self-made man who never amounted to much in the world when it came to money but he had a great deal of wealth in the thousands who gravitated to him and his tales of common people who overcame uncommon problems; killed giants; escaped witches, ghosts, and goblins; used common sense and everyday objects to always win in the end.  Ray Hicks won in the end and he won every time some new visitor traveled to Beech Mountain to sit on the porch of that old house and listen to this man with little education, a wonderful way of telling the stories of his childhood and his life, and a compassionate, all encompassing love for the common man and woman who always got back up and fought on against long odds to win in the end.  When that old house burned, North Carolina and America lost a cultural icon and a symbol the American pioneers who landed in the Tidewater and traveled deep into the mountains in order to build a new life and a new freedom far away from European plagues, kings, and ironclad class systems.  But the memories of Ray Hicks and that old house will always live on.  

"Same Sun Here" by Silas House and Neela Vaswani--Book Review

 

This is an adolescent book by Silas House and Neela Vaswani which has been widely applauded for several reasons.  It is a cooperative work by Silas House, who is the Director of The Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College, and Neela Vaswani, who has written several other books in a couple of genres including short stories and memoir.  This is the first book I have read by either author.  I read it primarily because my wife and I bought it to possibly give to our 11 year old nephew in Wisconsin and wanted to review it before sending it to him.  The book is written in the form of pen pal letters between a 12 year old Appalachian coal miner's son, River Dean Justice, and an Indian immigrant girl, Meena Joshi, of the same age in Chinatown in New York City.  Obviously, each of the authors wrote the letters for the child of their own heritage and I am willing to assume the book was produced primarily through e-mail exchanges between the authors.  The two children are both bright, quite emblematic of each of their native cultures, and have grandmothers who are very important parts of their lives.  River's "Mamaw" is his primary caregiver due to health and/or mental health problems of his mother who spends most of her time in bed and, for most of the book, takes little active part in his parenting.  Each of the children is facing and attempting to deal with personal and family problems which are common in their cultures and geographic areas.  River's father is an unemployed coal underground coal miner who has gone to South Alabama to find work and comes home only when he can.  Meena's father works in a catering company in New Jersey and comes home only on his days off and both father's are forced to stay near their work at times instead of returning home.  Meena's parents and older brother have immigrated to New York when she was quite young and left her in the care of her grandmother, Dadi, in India for several years due to problems related to money.  Both children love their grandmother's deeply.  

As the book progresses, a coal company opens a mountain top removal mine on Town Mountain overlooking the town near which River's family lives and also overlooking his school where he is a member of the middle school basketball team.  Meena's family live in an illegally sublet rent controlled apartment in Chinatown and they are very close to the elderly Chinese woman whose son is actually the legal tenant of the apartment in which they live.  They are always in fear of being evicted because landlords can sell such apartments for high dollar if they can get rid of the tenants.  River's grandmother is an active member of an anti-strip mining group and fighting to stop the mountain top removal project.  Eventually, Meena's gradmother dies in India, River becomes more actively opposed to strip mining and mountain top removal, and Meena's family continues to live in fear of eviction and homelessness.  The book is loaded with current hot button political issues in both locations with environmentalism, rent control tenant's rights, immigration, and the economic issues related to the low end working class.  

As the book nears its climax, River's basketball team is practicing in the school gym when a massive rock slide caused by the mountain top removal strikes the school and injures several of the players.  Meena's family and all of the other tenants are evicted and become homeless.  River and his grandmother join a protest in Frankfort, Kentucky, and River accidentally becomes a media darling with a planned trip to New York to appear on television and hopefully to finally meet Meena.  The book is well written, especially in light of the fact that is uses the authorial techniques it does.  The social issues discussed are timely and important in America.  This book has a great deal of merit and is well worth buying for an adolescent reader, especially such a reader in a liberal leaning family.  It says a great deal about inclusivity, environmentalism, immigration, Appalachia, tenant rights, and discrimination against both the Appalachian poor and immigrants.  I would suggest that, for the average adolescent reader, it would be a good idea for a parent or grandparent to read the book either before or with the child and have a structured discussion of the social and political issues it raises.  It is a very unique book and well worth placing in your child's private library. 

"Christmas And The Old House" by Tom T. Hall--Book Review

 

This is a children's Christmas book by Tom T. Hall.  Yes, THAT Tom T. Hall!  And, before you remember who he is and disappear without reading the rest of this review, you should know that I am talking about Tom T. Hall, the writer; Tom T. Hall, the novelist; Tom T. Hall, the short story author; Tom T. Hall, the non-fiction author; Tom T. Hall from Olive Hill, Kentucky.  Oh, yeah, he wrote a few songs too, eleven Number One songs and about a thousand others all of which are somewhere between good and great.  But you do not know the full Tom T. Hall until you have read his books, about a half dozen books in at least four genres: novels, short stories, autobiography, musical instruction books.  The man can write and I first encountered his short stories about thirty years ago. 

But this book, illustrated by Laura L. Seeley, is a wonderful Christmas books for children in the elementary grades.  Yet, it also has value for nearly every other reader.  It has spots which will make you laugh out loud and spots which will almost make you cry.  Which is what a lot of us have also found in that thousand or so songs the man is most famous for writing.  The book is about two children, six and seven, who live in the country across the road from an abandoned house.  The book is also somewhat religious in nature since it mentions Jesus Christ.  The children live next door to each other, play together daily, and Bobby is the narrator.  The book is written in language most second grade students can read and also in language which accurately depicts the thought processes and language of children in that age group.  Against their parents' rules, they cross the road, after planning their trip at their Planning Rock, and find that the old house has an evergreen tree growing up through the floor.  They decide to decorate the tree as Christmas tree for Jesus and the owner of the property and their parents catch them because the owner has come to visit the house he grew up in one more time before having it torn down.  But the book also has a happy ending and you will love reading it for yourself and for the small children in your life.  If it does nothing else for you, it will give you a new appreciation for the breadth and depth of Tom T. Hall's talent.  That old boy from Olive Hill can write and you should give yourself the gift of experiencing another side of the Tom T. Hall you have probably been hearing on the radio for the last fifty years.  

"A Place To Come To" by Robert Penn Warren--Book Review

 

When this novel was first released a reviewer in "The Harvard Crimson" had this to say about it: 

"In his latest novel, Robert Penn Warren combines a Southern preoccupation with the past with a typically modern concern with selfhood and alienation. His protagonist literally revels in his aloneness, his rootlessness, his inability to love. Nor is he content with a mere demonstration of his problems; instead, he explains them to us, over and over again, in a style that mixes the lofty literary references of academic--Jed is a medievalist at the University of Chicago--with Faulknerian neologisms and strings of appositives."  (Julia Klein, "Harvard Crimson", April 23, 1977)

In the end, Ms. Klein did not write a positive review of Robert Penn Warren's novel and I firmly believe she erred by doing so.  While this novel is not another "All The King's Men", Warren's best novel, it is a markedly good novel by a great writer and deserves to be read and appreciated just as much as anything else Warren ever wrote.  But, I suppose when you have won three Pulitzer Prizes, one for "All The King's Men" and two for a pair of his books of poetry, you are expected to write stupendously great literature even if your intent was only to produce a grocery list.   It seems to me that simply because Robert Penn Warren was never invited to join the group of American winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature some critics and general readers think he can be forgotten, left by the wayside of mass marketed literature, and ignored.  The list of American Nobel winners which includes Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Brodsky, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl S. Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and now even Bob Dylan, is a prodigious list and I do not mean to belittle or question the credentials of Bob Dylan by adding him to list as the last person.  But I do believe that Robert Penn Warren was just as deserving of a Nobel Prize as any American writer who was ever awarded one and a bit more than a few on that list. When I make a list of the greatest American writers, the names I put on that list are Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Buck, Warren, and Flannery O'Connor who also never lived long enough to accumulate a body of literature sufficient to earn the Nobel.  I also find it interesting that three of those writers are southern writers, Warren, Faulkner, and O'Connor.  

And that last statement brings me to one of the most important misconceptions about Robert Penn Warren.  He is sometimes thought of as an Appalachian writer and he definitely was not.  He was indisputably a Southern writer.  He was a self-avowed member of The Fugitives at Vanderbilt and lived much of his life, especially his academic life, at Vanderbilt University and Louisiana State University neither of which is Appalachian.  And his retirement was spent in New England.  Yes, Robert Penn Warren was born in Kentucky, Western Kentucky, which is not in Appalachia, not even in the ever expanding political definition of Appalachia used by the Appalachian Regional Commission and the congress which is a purely political definition based totally in pork barrel politics and not remotely culturally based.  Warren was born and raised in Todd County Kentucky on the Tennessee border in Western Kentucky far outside both the political and cultural boundaries of Appalachia.  He never referred to himself as Appalachian and rightly so.  He never wrote Appalachian Literature.  He wrote Southern Literature and wrote it just as well as Faulkner and O'Connor, even better at times.  

Now that I  have made one more diligent attempt to murder the myth of Robert Penn Warren as an Appalachian writer, let's talk about this book which is a damn fine novel about a southern college professor, raised in Alabama,  living in Nashville and teaching at a college which we can assume is based loosely on Vanderbilt. The writer and professor moves to Chicago to pursue a doctorate, has an affair with a young Jewish woman there, then marries a young woman from the Dakotas who eventualy dies of cancer.  He returns her to her homeland to be buried near her relatives and after her death returns to Tennessee to teach.  The novel is filled with very unique, very human, very well written characters who move in and out of the protagonists life which is often centered around a group of friends which his wealthy lover and her husband have collected on their southern farm.  The protagonist is drifting loosely along in life, attempting to abandon and deny his youth in the deep south and at times filled with ennui.  The death of his wife and her burial in the Dakotas where she grew up is part of the source of that rootlessness but the character is much deeper than one source of ennui.  He is drifting through a group of friends and acquaintances who ride fancy horses, attend fancy parties with their fancy friends, and also seem to drift from moment to moment without aim or purpose.  

But this is a fine novel filled with excellent character development, precise plotting, and tension which must always seek resolution.  It is, admittedly, not "All The King's Men" and it was never intended to be. Warren intended this novel to be "A Place To Come To" and it is.  He intended this protagonist to be Jed Tewksbury whose father died drunk falling from a wagon box while attempting to urinate on the hindquarters of a mule only to be found graveyard dead on a dirt road in Alabama with his penis out of his pants.  That graphic image haunts Jed Tewksbury throughout the novel and a great deal of his ennui can be said to be rooted both in his childhood poverty and his father's ignominious death and drunken lifestyle along with his mother's eventual love for and marriage to a stepfather whom Jed Tewksbury does not really  like and, yet, Jed finds in the end that his little hometown in Alabama is "A Place To Come To".  The novel is filled with the characteristic, powerful writing of Robert Penn Warren.  He moves through the novel like a world champion boxer scattering a combination of literary left hooks, body blows, and precise three and four words jabs into the mind of the astute reader.   If you love good to great literature, southern literature, you need to read this book, and remember as you read it that it was never intended to be "All The King's Men". 

"The Kentucky Cycle", Pulitzer Prize Winning Drama by Robert Schenkkan

 

"The Kentucky Cycle" by Robert Schenkkan is a Pulitzer Prize winning dramatic script which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.  It is comprised of nine short one act plays which are intended to be produced by the same company of actors in one or two days and has been produced onstage in only a small number of cities.  Yet, it won the Pulitzer over four other finalists including "Two Trains Running" by August Wilson, the great African American playwright whose plays had won two Pulitzer prizes in the previous five years, and whose crafting of drama was so consistently above average that in his lifetime he had five plays nominated for the prize including two which were winners.  In fact, Wilson's "Fences" is generally considered one of the greatest plays ever written.  I am not certain that the Pulitzer committee got it right in 1992.  

"The Kentucky Cycle" is described as a "...sweeping epic of three families in Eastern Kentucky (which) spans 200 years of American history from 1775 to 1975."  The world premier of "The Kentucky Cycle" was held in Seattle and the production opened on Broadway on November 14, 1993, almost 11 months after the Pulitzer Prizes were awarded.  The Broadway production closed on December 12, 1993, less than a month after the opening with a total of only 33 performances which says the play was less than a success in New York.  It averaged less than 57% of capacity during the Broadway run.  

I do not claim to be an expert on drama as literature or on dramatic production but I have acted in numerous one act Christmas plays during my grade school years, played leads in a few college plays, and read drama on a regular basis.  In my estimation, this play or plays, if you prefer, since it is composed of nine one act plays which were intended to be performed in either one day with a lunch break or over two days with five of the plays on one day and four on the other, is of less quality than the average winner of a Pulitzer Prize.  The script is filled with gratuitous violence including a double murder in the opening minutes; one case of patricide; one case of filicide because the child was born a girl; contains numerous negative stereotypes of Appalachian people; frequent use of the cultural and ethnic epithet "hillbilly"; and appears to have been written primarily as an experiment in minimal staging and unique production elements.  I tend to believe that the Pulitzer was awarded for two reasons: 1) the unique staging with minimal sets and little changes during the switches from one play to another made it a unique creature in American drama; 2) August Wilson had just won two Pulitzer Prizes for his plays in the previous five years and the committee had no intentions of being accused of considering him a favored playwright again.  

The script is a unique creature as I have stated above and it does have some redeeming qualities but those qualities and the Pulitzer win were not enough to keep it in frequent staging around the country at outdoor theaters, college and university drama departments, or other venues.  It obviously had to be premiered in Seattle instead of Broadway and had to garner the Pulitzer before a Broadway producer and theater would take a chance on it.  Its use of the cultural and ethnic epithet "hillbilly" is just as reprehensible as the use of any other such epithet about any other such minority group.  Its demands on the stamina and time commitment of an audience make it a production that is more likely to be endured rather than simply enjoyed.  Its use of dialect writing which is often less than perfect also makes it unlikely to be admired by the general American audience and more likely to be perceived by such an audience as another depiction of "those poor, ignorant hillbillies".  I can say that I am glad I read it since it is alleged to depict the history of Eastern Kentucky albeit that depiction is less than perfect.  It is a piece of the greater puzzle of the literature of Appalachia and Eastern Kentucky and it is not the first piece of literature to be well received by some small, perhaps previously prejudiced, portion of the general public and less well by Appalachian audiences.  I would not bet ten cents that it will ever be produced again anywhere in America.  Don't waste your time reading it unless you are a theater buff who loves to read all scripts or an Appalachian scholar who loves to read and study the entire body of Appalachian Literature.  

I would also like to thank Millie Perdue who located this script and gifted it to me because of my expressed interest in reading it.  Thanks, Millie! 

"A Triumph Of The Spirit" by Lee Maynard--Book Review

 

Over the last few years on this blog, I have written extensively about the writing of Lee Maynard.  In fact, I have written about every book the man ever published except this one and one more, very minor book about life in the outdoors which was his first published book and is now nearly impossible to find at a price which can be afforded by anyone except the proverbial Philadelphia lawyer.  "A Triumph Of The Spirit" is likely to be Lee Maynard's last book since he died on June 16, 2017, at the age of eighty after producing a total of nine published books including that very small edition of the outdoor book.  This book was published posthumously by an entity  named Western Door Publishing which appears to be an entity which might be owned by Amazon Books.  The copy I own is a publication on demand type book which is, in my estimation, another short coming of the computer age.  The book was published posthumously.  It may or may not have been in the editing and publication process before Maynard died.  It might or might not have been published by his heirs and primarily edited by them and an editor at Western Door Publishing although actual editing work is a chimera in the publication on demand business.  Whatever the actual answers are, the book was not published by the University of West Virginia Press which had published six of his previous books.  This book is composed of   numerous sections of his previous books and several other previously unpublished short stories and memoir pieces.  But it is well worth reading despite the nature of the editing and publication process and the flaws which that process allowed to escape a higher quality editor.  

 Lee Maynard loved motorcycles, rode them all his life, and a great deal of his writing was a courtship with motorcycles.  He apparently loved to ride Triumph motorcycles, hence the title which is, of course, a double meaning which also addresses a life well lived and produced success in several areas for Maynard including his writing career, work as an administrator for the state of West Virginia, time as the CEO of a major outdoor experience company, and a brief stint as a university president.  The book loosely follows a timeline of Maynard's life and writing career with sections republished from all his major books including the well known and, at times, notorious "Crum Trilogy" which is comprised of "Crum", "Screaming With The Cannibals", and "The Scummers", all of which I have read and written about on this blog at the links provided.  Maynard also produced and I have previously read and reviewed "The Pale Light of Sunset Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life".  He also wrote and I have read and appreciated but failed so far to write about a novel called "Cinco Becknell" which is set in New Mexico and is about a man in the homeless population with whom Maynard worked as the founder and board member of a food bank in the area.  I will attempt to correct my error in never writing about that book in the near future.  But, right now, let's discuss the work in question, "A Triumph Of The Spirit".  

 

While significant portions of the book are material which, to my knowledge, never previously saw the light of day, much of it is sections of Maynard's previous half dozen books.  Admittedly, most of those previously published sections contain some of his best known and appreciated work.  Several other short stories, and one story which can best be described as a novella, are also included in the book.  Whoever edited the book, appears to have made a conscious attempt to do some chronological ordering of the sections but that work is not absolute.  It does not fully provide a comprehensive timeline of either Lee Maynard's life or his published works.  But, it is still well worth reading, especially if you have already read any of his work and appreciated it.  Four of the stories in the book, including the novella I alluded to earlier, are good, high quality fiction.  It is impossible to know if Maynard had any intentions, as he wrote those stories, of either producing a complete book of short stories or, perhaps, publishing the novella as such or expanding it into a full length novel.  

There is one short anecdote about riding with a friend in Maine on motorcycles, being caught in bad weather, taking shelter in what they believed was an abandoned service station, and having the local sheriff called to remove them.  The story ends with the sheriff responding to the call, as the elderly female owner requested, and then transporting the two and their motorcycles on a trailer the sheriff brought along with an obvious preconceived plan to his jail where he fed them, gave them dry clothes, and housed them comfortably for the night in his warm, and apparently empty jail, all without any animosity and a good deal of hospitality.  The novella, titled "The Corn Princess" is set in a native American pueblo in New Mexico where the main character, based on Maynard himself as nearly all of his protagonists are, is an Anglo man who visits the village at times to spend time recuperating from the road and lusts after a beautiful young native woman who has a boyfriend of less than positive character.  This story deserves to have become  a full length novel and I honestly suspect that might have been Maynard's original intent if life and old age had not caught up with him before the job was done.  Another of the better new pieces in the book is called "Scorpion" and is a somewhat long short story about a male, Anglo motorcycle rider and a Hispanic woman whose beloved grandfather has been murdered by other, less decent motorcycle riders.  This story contains some of Maynard's best writing about the sexual attraction, sex, human interaction, and the potential cruelty of human nature.  It also could have easily been expanded into a better than average novel.  

My final conclusions about this book are these: 1) it is a shame that it is not more cohesive and chronological; 2) it is a shame that Maynard did not live to fully oversee the publication process; 3) it is a shame that Lee Maynard never published an actual collection of short stories; 4) it is a shame that Lee Maynard did not live to expand at least two of these stories into novels; and 5) I will always miss knowing that another good Lee Maynard novel is about to come hot off the press.  

But, for the average reader, especially one who loves motorcycles and riding, this is a book worth the time and expense of reading. 

"The Last Chivaree" by Robert Isbell--Book Review

 

Over the last several months, I have become more interested in Appalachian oral storytelling and traditional Appalachian folk songs than I had ever been.  Although I had never really heard many of the traditional folk tales and Jack tales, I had always been aware of them.  But I became interested in the work of the great deceased Appalachian storyteller Ray Hicks and have also learned of the work of Josiah H. Combs and others.  I was gifted a book called "Beech Mountain Man" about a nephew of Ray Hicks named Ronda Lee Hicks and based on audio recordings of Ronda Lee Hicks by the great Appalachian author, professor, and researcher Thomas Burton whom I had met at a large serpent handling church service in Western North Carolina.  I had also obtained, read, and written about "Rosie Hicks And Her Recipe Book" by Donnie Henderson Shedlarz which had also been edited and published by Thomas Burton after the death of Ms. Shedlarz.  All of these things led me to become more interested in Ray Hicks, his life and work.  

 

This book has apparently been produced and published in two different editions and under two different titles for some reason or other.  The author, Robert Isbell, also produced another book under the title "Ray Hicks Master Story Teller Of The Blue Ridge".  But, it seems this was just a reissue of "The Last Chivaree" which might have been done by the publisher, University Of North Carolina Press, in an effort to take advantage of the popularity and/or death of Ray Hicks.  The title, based on the Appalachian practice of the chivaree, may also have been using too obscure a word to increase sales.  A chivaree was a practice of throwing a party or, in come cases, a harassing event after a wedding.  I had heard of the word and the practice as a child from my father, Ballard Hicks, who told of chivaree's being practiced in his early days in the late 1800's and early 1900's in Knott County Kentucky.  Since I am writing more than one hundred years after that time, I probably owe my readers the explanation that my father was sixty-four years old when I was born and I benefited culturally from having him tell me the culturally based events of his early days.  I also benefited from the fact that I grew up in a country store and regularly heard my father and other men his age tell stories about their young days.  As my father described a chivaree, the harassment portion of the event involved a large group of friends, relatives, and neighbors of the bride and groom who showed up at their home for the wedding and threw a party.  But the party would often last all night long and part of the object was to keep the newly married couple up all night and prevent the immediate consummation of the marriage.  My father said this would involve both singing, dancing, story telling and simple noise making when all else failed.  The partiers might even resort to banging on pots and pans or shooting guns off into the night to disturb the newlyweds.  One of my father's favorite stories said that at one such marriage and chivaree that newlyweds had managed to go upstairs into the loft of the old log house to go to bed and the crowd below had dwindled down to only a few tired and quieter people who fell silent.  So his story goes, they suddenly heard the newlyweds talking in bed.  The dialogue went like this: 

Husband: "Well, I'm yours and you're mine."  

Wife: "Yes, we are."

Husband: "Well, you make the first move."  

The chivaree actually plays only a small part in Robert Isbell's book and is discussed only once in a brief section.  But this is an excellent book if you are interested in the life of Ray Hicks or Appalachian folk tales, Jack tales, or folk songs. It also gives an excellent account of life in Watauga County North Carolina in the early to middle twentieth century.  Robert Isbell knew Ray and Rosie Hicks well for many years and recorded numerous encounters with them.  The book is based on those recordings.  The book contains several of Ray Hicks' favorite stories and a few traditional folk songs as well as an excellent accounting of the life of the Hicks family in Watauga County.  Ray Hicks was a fascinating man who had grown up in poverty but was very self sufficient in subsistence farming and a variety of other rural agrarian occupations.  But, despite his fame, he never gained much money in his entire life.  He spent nearly all of his life in the aged farm house in which he was raised and within sight of the home of one set of his grandparents.  His wife Rosie had grown up in walking distance of Ray and their courtship took place almost exclusively on foot.  Ray would walk several miles to the home of Rosie's parents and spend the evenings sitting in front of the large stone fireplace in the little house which is described as "having ground hog hides nailed on the outside walls".  

This is an excellent book for the student of Appalachian Folkways, folk songs, Jack tales, and the rural, mountain lifestyle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  It is easy to locate on most used book websites and is well worth reading.