Cratis Williams And I On Traditional Appalachian Children's Games

An earlier post on "Death, Dying, and Funeral Rites In Appalachia" which I wrote about a week ago, based on some of the writing in Cratis Williams' book "Tales From Sacred Wind: Coming Of Age In Appalachia", was one of the most appealing for my readers in quite some time and I promised that I would write a more formal review of the book when I complete it which I promise I will still do.  I haven't completed the book yet but I have encountered another section in it which has prompted me to write it while it is still fresh in my mind.  At the time I wrote these two most recent posts about Cratis Williams, I neglected to mention in either of them that I had written a much earlier post called "Responses To Some Reading Of Cratis Williams" which might also be interesting to some of you.  It is a response to a small pamphlet he wrote about his most important early teacher, William H. Vaughan, who was a primary influence in leading Williams to pursue a career in academia which was not common at the time in Eastern Kentucky. 

Cratis Williams--Photo by The Williams Family

The section in discussion here is called "Appalachian Folkways: At Play" and prompted me to remember many experiences from my own childhood growing up in Knott County in Eastern Kentucky about forty years and fifty miles from Sacred Wind where Cratis Williams spent his childhood.  This section in his book is only about four pages but it contains a lot of excellent reminiscences and reminded me a great deal of my own childhood.  Admittedly, Williams grew up on a dirt road in what were still, essentially, horse and buggy days.  I grew up on Kentucky Route 7, a paved state highway,
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 but still in one of the more remote areas of the Big Sandy River drainage which also takes in Sacred Wind.  But I grew up with a father, Ballard Hicks,  who was sixty-four when I was born and about the same age as Cratis Williams' father.  I was also strongly influenced by my maternal grandparents, Woots and Susie Hicks, who were actually a few years younger than my father.  My mother, Mellie Hicks, was roughly the same age as Cratis Williams' mother so our major cultural influences came from people  who were about the same age who had spent their lives in much the same way.  Both his grandfather and my father ran small country stores for many years.  Both our extended families were primarily subsistence farmers.  In many ways our childhoods were the same although I do admit that I probably grew up under less financial stress than he and his siblings.

In this section of his book, he talks about the games and other forms of amusement he and his siblings and classmates benefited from as children.   Many of those experiences were nearly identical to my own.  My one regret about this section of his book is that he did not write more at length on this topic.  In the days in which we grew up, there were no electrical toys and most of our recreation was comprised of games and amusements which required no money, no extensive use of physical equipment, and no store bought devices.  He discusses attempts to catch wild game as a child and I did that also as a form of amusement more than he did.  For his family, catching wild game was purely a subsistence effort.  He discusses building figure four wooden triggers to set dead falls for small animals which I never learned to do.  He also discusses setting homemade box traps for the same wild game such as opossums, ground hogs, rabbits, and raccoons which I and my peers also did but on a more limited basis.  The box traps we all used were homemade with screen wire and/or wood and I came to know them as Hoover Boxes because they had been so named during the Great Depression by my ancestors and their peers all over America.  Williams also discussed going ground hog, opossum, and racoon hunting.  My father had effectively stopped hunting due to his age by the time I was old enough to go hunting but I did hunt in a limited way as a child with other members of my family and friends. But one of my most pleasant memories of my father when I was a small child, sometime before I was six, he went on what must have been one of his last squirrel hunting trips and brought back a squirrel he had shot just as it was starting to eat a hickory nut which was locked in its mouth still.  I was never an effective shot with a rifle so I never became a shooter who could "bark" a squirrel but I did rabbit hunt sometimes and went coon hunting a few times with other local people.  For those of you who have never heard of "barking" a squirrel, it was a practice used sometimes by expert shots with a twenty-two rifle in which they would not shoot directly at a squirrel on a tree but would judge their shot so that the bullet would strike within a quarter inch or less of the animal's head and kill it with the concussion without leaving a mark on it.  By doing this, the head, in my opinion the most delicious part of a squirrel, was not harmed and you got to eat it all including the tongue and brain.  In early spring, ground hog hunting was common for nearly all boys my age.  All you needed was a dog which would chase and, if necessary, fight a ground hog which is not an easy task for a dog.  If the ground hog made it into the hole,  you could attempt to smoke it out by building a small fire in the mouth of the hole, blowing the smoke into the hole, and the animal would usually come out although sometimes it would be through a second exit from the burrow which nearly all ground dwelling animals have.  Sometimes, even without a dog, you could get a ground hog if you knew where one was denning by either stalking it from fifty yards or so away and shooting it when it came out or digging it out which could sometimes be a lot of work.  It was also common in my childhood for ground hog hunters in early spring to dig out litters of young ground hogs and bottle raise them as pets which Williams does not mention.  My grandparents, well before I was born, had a pet ground hog for several years which I have heard many stories about.  It would live at the house all spring, summer, and most of the fall and then disappear to hibernate for the winter.  For several years, this ground hog whose name I don't remember, would come waddling back home when hibernation ended in early spring.  I also knew several families on Beaver Creek who had, at various times, pet squirrels, raccoons, ground hogs, and flying squirrels.  If you caught any of these animals when they were quite young, they all made good pets.  

Cratis Williams also discussed fishing and gigging along with using either a rifle or a sledge hammer to kill fish through ice in winter.  I fished and gigged all through my childhood but I had never heard of using the concussion of hitting ice with a sledge hammer to kill fish if they were visible.  But I also rarely saw ice thick enough in winter to have done that if I had known about it.  In my opinion, global warming had already become a mild issue in the forty years between my childhood and Williams'.  Williams also discusses a game he and his peers played in the woods which they called "Fox And Hounds".  It was basically a tag or chasing game in which a group of children would choose teams of "Foxes" and "Hounds" and the "Hounds" would chase the "Foxes" and try to catch them.  In my childhood, any game of this nature had just become tag.  Williams also discusses a war game which corresponded to our "Cowboys And Indians" which he and his peers called "Colonials And Redcoats".  I and my peers had already, to a limited extent, been influenced by television and, if that game had ever existed in Knott County as it had in his native Lawrence County, it had just reverted to "Cowboys And Indians".  Williams also discussed having made homemade bows and arrows from small tree branches.  I saw some of this in my childhood and actually knew a family who had a son lose an eye to a homemade arrow which had been shot by one of his friends.  

In the two room school in which I grew up, boys in the fourth through the eighth grades were allowed to go anywhere we wanted to for the hour of lunch so long as we could return to school in time for "Books" to be called to resume class.  Most of us older boys, in that hour, would hit the woods, except for a few who had to run home to eat lunch.  We would climb, run, chase each other, and swing on grape vines which we had cut at the bottom to give us a free end but leave the grapevine still attached to the tree.  We also had a game which we called "Riding Out" young poplars.  The better climbers would climb as high as possible up a young, slim poplar tree until they reached the point where the tree began to lean and eventually get close enough to the ground for the rider to drop off or actually just step off. If you were agile and strong, you could sometimes find a stand of young poplars on a hillside and ride from tree to tree down the hill for quite a distance. But we had one event in this game which effectively put an end to it for a long while.  A neighbor boy older than me was "Riding Out" a young poplar which it turned out had a weak spot near the top.  The tree broke and he fell close to fifteen or twenty feet to the ground and was unconscious for a while.  The other boys carried him back to the school where he was laid on a long table which the first graders used for class and he eventually regained consciousness with some soreness and no long lasting damage.  I also remember one incident in which the boys who were gathering kindling for the coal stoves in the two rooms found a copper head about two or three feet long which was nearly frozen on a cold morning after having crawled out the day before in warmer weather.  They brought the poisonous snake into the classroom and laid it in front of the stove where it thawed out enough to crawl around.  Then somebody picked it up with the coal shovel and threw it back out in the cold where it became stiff again.  The teachers actually allowed us to bring it back into school a couple of times before it was eventually killed as I recall.  I am sure that if teachers in today's world ever allowed children to "Ride Out" young trees or bring poisonous snakes into school they would be immediately fired.  But not one negative word was ever said about either of these events.  To our families, it was just boys being boys.  

Cratis Williams also discusses what he calls "throwing" games which usually involved rocks and says one of his sisters was the best at those amusements. He says they often would throw rocks at lizards and sometimes actually catch sleeping lizards with a small stick and a noose made of skinned, limber tree bark.  By the time I was in school forty years later, we had baseball and basketball with an actual basketball goal on a pole in the school yard.  But our baseball game, which we and many other young Appalachians of the time called "Round Town", was played with bases made of flat rocks and a rubber ball. We rarely had any baseball gloves the rubber ball was much easier than a hard ball to catch.  In the early grades from first to fourth, we boys often played "Cowboys and Indians" in the school yard with a herd of stick horses usually cut from sumac, or "shoemake", trees as Williams and I both grew up calling sumac.  We even took this game to the point that we actually named our best stick horses.   

Interestingly, Cratis Williams does not talk about any kind of board game at all.  By the time of my childhood, we at least had checkers and I suspect he might have also.  But one of the things he reminded me of was a traditional Appalachian Folk board game which my father tried to teach me and I was not interested in enough to bother to learn it which I deeply regret.  That game was called "Fox And Geese" and apparently can be traced back to Europe well before American colonization.  Some experts claim it might actually be Medieval in origin.  The game is played on a board which can be made of anything from tanned animal skin to cardboard to a flat piece of a wide board.  The layout is a cross shaped area which is broken into five smaller areas comprised of the center section and the four wings.  There is only one "Fox" and fifteen geese.  When my father tried to teach me, he had drawn the board on a piece of a cardboard box from our little country store. His geese were white grains of corn and his fox was a red grain.

Fox And Geese Board--Photo by Masters Of Games

I have learned that there are also variations of the game with thirteen, seventeen, or twenty-two geese.  According to the website which I linked above, the game is described this way:  Fox & Geese is a game of inequality. The geese cannot capture the fox but aim, through the benefit of numbers, to hem the fox in so that he cannot move. The objective of the fox, on the other hand, is to capture geese until it becomes impossible for them to trap him. The geese start by occupying all 6 squares of one arm of the cross plus the whole first adjacent row and the two end points of the central row. The fox starts in the middle of the board.  The game of Fox & Geese is played upon a cross shaped board consisting of a 3x3 point square in the middle with four 2 x 3 point areas adjacent to each face of the central square. This makes a total of 33 points. Pieces are allowed to move from one point to another only along lines which join points. Accompanying the board, there should be a single playing piece representing the fox in black or red and 15 white playing pieces representing the geese.  According to the Masters Of Games website cited above, the game is actually considered to have been rooted in medieval times.  I don't know that a mathematician would say that this game is as complicated as chess but you can surely bet that it is more complicated than checkers.  I never learned to play it with my father and I deeply regret having been too young and dumb to have given both of us that joy.  Now, forty-nine years after my father's death, I am considering making my own board, shelling a few grains of corn, and trying to induce my wife to learn it with me.  She has also become fascinated with the game and we intend to try to play it until we get some skill.  The woman who cleans our house is about my age and also remembers the game being played by her father who was about 37 years younger than my father.  I also knew that man before his death a few years ago, visited him numerous times, and regret that I also unknowingly lost a second opportunity to learn "Fox And Geese" from someone who grew up playing it.   

Ballard Hicks, My Father--Photo by Roger D. Hicks

Covid 19 And The Viet Nam War

Today, April 28, 2020, after only four months of the Covid 19 Pandemic in the United States, we will surpass the total number of US deaths in the Viet Nam War which lasted 20 years.  As of this morning, April 28, 2020, we have had 56,933 US deaths from Covid 19 and we are averaging about 2,000 deaths a day.  In the entire Viet Nam War, we had 58,220 deaths.  The first death in the Viet Nam War took place on June 8, 1956.  The first American soldier killed in the Vietnam War was Air Force T-Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr. He is listed by the U.S. Department of Defense as having a casualty date of June 8, 1956.  The last two deaths in the Viet Nam War took place on April 29, 1975.  On April 29, 1975, Charles McMahon (May 10, 1953 – April 29, 1975) and Darwin Lee Judge (February 16, 1956 – April 29, 1975) were the last two United States servicemen killed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The two men, both U.S. Marines, were killed in a rocket attack one day before the Fall of Saigon.  The 45th anniversary of those two deaths will be tomorrow, April 29, 2020.  If you do not see the irony in that, you are incapable of understanding irony.  The first US death from the Corona Virus is believed to have been on February 6, 2020, although we cannot precisely determine who the first casualty of the Corona Virus might have been or the precise date of that first death. We are also on the verge of becoming the first country in the world with 1 million cases of Covid 19.  In three months or so, the Corona Virus has killed more Americans than died in the Viet Nam War.  

And, the great majority of those deaths and those million plus cases of Covid 19 infection were preventable if TRAITOR Trump and his co-conspirators in Washington had done anything to save the country from the pandemic when they were repeatedly advised by the intelligence and health care communities in January and February 2020.  A news story has just been published by the Washington Post, the most reputable newspaper in the country, that the White House was advised and warned many times in the "president's" Daily Briefing Book in the period leading up to the deliberately late and inadequate action, or more appropriately inactions, from TRAITOR Trump and the White House. Nearly on a daily basis, the White House was warned that a pandemic was coming which was already proving to have devastating effects in China where it presumably originated and that it would have just as serious an effect on the United States unless decisive actions were taken to prevent it entering the country.   

In addition to those 58,000 plus deaths we have seen so far, the national economy has been devastated by both the virus and the deliberate refusals of the White House to do anything decisive to stop it.  Yes, congress passed a multi-trillion dollar relief bill but most of that money went to large corporations.  The White House has refused to help states and their governors to obtain the necessary testing equipment, respirators, ventilators, and personal protective equipment.  In fact, the inactions of the White House have created a horrible bidding war between the state governments and each other along with other countries which are also searching for those same critical supplies.  This situation is getting worse in many ways.  The meat packing industry has become a center of several outbreaks across several states including Iowa, Indiana, and Colorado.  Three plants which produce about 15% of the commercial meats in America have been forced to shut down due to the outbreaks within each of them.  According to the South Bend Tribune  "More than 150 of America’s largest meat processing plants operate in counties where the rate of coronavirus infection is already among the nation’s highest, based on the media outlets’ analysis of slaughterhouse locations and county-level COVID-19 infection rates."  That statistic is likely both a symptom of problems within the meat packing industry with the dense work settings and high speed demands on workers, and on the geography of where those plants are located.  But the meat packing industry has been enabled by the White House to stretch the limits of safe practices for all of the last three years.  Now, due to the Corona Virus, livestock farmers in the Midwest and South are being forced to consider euthanizing more than a million hogs because they are now past prime killing weight and now are literally eating their owners out of house and home with no market available.  Millions of tons and thousands of acres of vegetable crops are being plowed under by vegetable farmers all over the Midwest and South because they cannot get sufficient labor to pick those crops and do not have ready markets for many of them.  Dairy farmers are being forced to flush millions of gallons of unsold milk down drains even as lines at food banks are longer than at any time since the Great Depression and those same food banks cannot obtain sufficient food products to meet the needs of the suddenly destitute families in America.  America's farmers, especially small family farms, were already in the worst economic period they have faced since the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.  Farm bankruptcies rose by 20% in 2019 and they are rising even more rapidly in 2020. 

The sad truth is that nearly everything about this disaster was avoidable if a competent, caring, legally, and duly elected President of the United States had been in office in January when the White House was first notified of the impending disaster by the intelligence and health care communities.  But, instead, we have a TRAITOR who usurped the White House with the assistance of Vladimir Putin and Russia living illegally in the White House, refusing to take any appropriate actions in the crisis, actually advising Americans to consider injecting disinfectants into their bodies, and denying state governors the assistance we must have in order to survive this crisis.  

Suicide As A Theme In Country And Bluegrass Music

This is a topic which I have considered writing about on this blog for quite some time after having written my previous post about what I call "Dead Baby Music" in Bluegrass.  I recently heard a song by Bluegrass banjo player and comedian David "String Bean" Akemon called "Suicide Blues" which is so strongly and clearly about suicide that I knew I had to write this blog post.  With the general public perception of String Bean as being primarily a comedian, I know many of you probably don't think he ever recorded a serious song. I am uncertain about who wrote the song since I have also located a 1919 version of it recorded by a man named Arthur Collins who was known as a ragtime singer.

David "String Bean" Akemon--Photo by Wide Open Country

But "Suicide Blues" is not the only serious song String Bean ever recorded.  He also wrote and recorded a strongly worded anti-Vietnam War song called "Crazy Vietnam War" which took me by surprise when I found it recently.  I also have to say that it surprised me even after I have known one of his banjo playing nephews, Phillip Akemon, who is a man of many talents in Gray Hawk, Kentucky, not far from where String Bean grew up in Annville, Kentucky.  But, to get to "Suicide Blues", here are the lyrics: 

I go downtown
Lay by the railroad tracks
I'm gonna go downtown
Lay down by the railroad tracks
You see I don't want nothin'
Since my baby, she ain't comin' back

My lady she's gone
Took all my reason to live
My baby she gone
Took all my reason to live
Since she don't want me
I got nothin' left to give

Chorus:
She won't see me
Won't pick up the telephone
I wonder if she knows
She's the reason that I'll be gone

Lay in my bed
Stare at the ceiling for a while
I'm gonna lay in my bed
Stare at the ceiling for a while
My baby gonna miss me
My lady gonna miss me when I die

(Repeat Chorus)

Got my pills
Got my bottle of gin
I'm gonna swallow my pills
Swallow my bottle of gin
When I close my eyes
I won't see the sun again

(Repeat Chorus)

Get me a gun
Go back into my room
I'm gonna get me a gun
One with a barrel or two
You know I'm better off dead than
Singing these suicide blues

There are no more clearly suicidal lyrics ever written than those above recorded by David "String Bean" Akemon and Arthur Collins.  Every verse has a clearly worded statement about suicide.  In the first verse, we read about the reason for the contemplated suicide "my baby, she ain't comin' back" and we also hear the first of several stated methods for suicide "I'm gonna go downtown Lay down by the railroad tracks".  In at least one recorded version of the song, String Bean changed the words in that stanza slightly in order to more directly reference suicide and sang  "I'm gonna go downtown and Lay my head on the railroad tracks".  The chorus expands on the blaming of the former girlfriend or wife   "I wonder if she knows She's the reason that I'll be gone".  In the second stanza, the reason for the suicide is discussed further  My lady she's gone Took all my reason to live."  The third stanza discusses a common theme among many actual victims of suicide and attempted suicide, the concept of having the person who is being blamed know about the suicide and the fact that "It is their fault".  I should also state here that I am a trained mental health and substance abuse therapist with a Master of Education degree in Counseling and Human Development, a Bachelor of Social Work degree, and more than twenty years experience in the field.  I have dealt with hundreds of potentially suicidal clients in my professional life.  The wording in that third stanza says "My baby gonna miss me My lady gonna miss me when I die".  The fourth stanza references a new method of suicide, substance abuse, with these words  "I'm gonna swallow my pills Swallow my bottle of gin When I close my eyes  I won't see the sun again".  This wording is also introducing the common idea among suicidal people of the world, either before or after death, as a dark place with the words "when I close my eyes I won't see the sun again". The fifth and concluding stanza of String Bean's "Suicide Blues" introduces the most common suicide method for men, gunfire, with the words  "I'm gonna get me a gun One with a barrel or two You know I'm better off dead than Singing these suicide blues".  I have no idea or information that David "String Bean" Akemon ever actually contemplated suicide but we all know that he had thought enough about it to record "Suicide Blues".  

Now, let's discuss the most popular song in country music of which I know that mentions suicide. That one is "The Ballad of Billy Joe"  which was recorded by Bobbie Gentry.  I am not including the full lyrics to the song here but, in the first stanza the song bluntly references the suicide of the character Billy Joe McAllister "I got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge  Today, Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge".  Unlike "Suicide Blues", this song is written in the third person and it is the narrator who discusses the suicide in a manner which tells the listener that the suicide was unexpected.  In the second stanza, we see a common element which is seen after actual suicides when the lyrics place blame on the victim by saying "And papa said to mama, as he passed around the blackeyed peas Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense; pass the biscuits, please." These words lead us to understand that the victim was not considered reasonable or reasonably intelligent and that the character "Papa" blames "Billy Joe" for his own death.  This is one of the most enigmatic songs in all of country music in that it never clearly establishes a reason for the suicide being discussed but does establish a relationship between the victim and the narrator and her family. 

Bobbie Gentry--Photo by Rolling Stone

It also mentions the fact that the narrator is affected by the news and does not eat normally with these words from the fourth stanza "And mama said to me, child, what's happened to your appetite? I've been cookin' all morning, and you haven't touched a single bite".  That fourth stanza is just loaded with information, lack of information, and  is the basis of the major enigma of the song as well as what I believe is the source of much of its undying popularity with these further words  "He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge And she and Billy Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge".    The final stanza has the narrator tell us "And me, I spend a lot of time pickin' flowers up on Choctaw Ridge And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge".  This stanza seals the deal on the enigma(s) of the song in more than one way.  It establishes that the narrator has returned to the Tallahatchie Bridge to throw flowers, a common sign of mourning, into the river where Billie Joe McAllister commited suicide and where the two of them were presumably seen throwing something off the bridge.  What it does not tell us is what the two people were seen throwing off the bridge, why Billie Joe actually committed suicide, or exactly what constituted their connection.

One of my favorite performers and song writers of all time, Tom T. Hall, wrote a song called "The Rolling Mills Of Middletown" in which the narrators friend disappears in a steel mill in the Ohio steel town of Middletown to which hundreds, if not thousands, of native Appalachians moved in the Great Migration.  In that song, the narrator tells a story of his friend who is a worker in a steel mill who marries a woman of questionable morals.  "I knew he shouldn't marry any woman quite that wild Then later on I learned that she had been expectin' a child."  After the marriage, things go down hill as they often do, both in real life and in country music songs.  "He worked all night she shopped all day bought everything that fit A helper on the BOF three thousand degrees at a round His wife was just about that hot in the bars in old Middletown  Of course he was the last to know".  Those lines continue the story of the deteriorating marriage and are reinforced by the line in the repeated refrain "the rolling mills of Middletown roll on, roll on, roll on".  That refrain is a clear indicator of the inevitability of life both for a steel mill worker and for the subject of the song in his unsalvageable marriage.  Then Tom T. Hall, who is one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived in my opinion, brings us to his own enigmatic conclusion.  "One night the foreman on his turn said, "Cool down No 2" And he told my friend to go on home as soon as he was through He stopped into a little bar to have a good cold beer His woman and some dayturn guy were dancing closely there Oh, I knew him well and in his mind there must have been a storm  While the rolling mills of Middletown roll on, roll, on roll on They say he never spoke a word he just turned and walked away".  The jilted husband now has irrevocable proof of his wife's infidelity and instead of confronting her and her companion "he just turned and walked away.  And no one knows exactly what took place that fateful day."  Hall, "The Storyteller" as he has been known for many years, has nearly brought this story to its sad conclusion.  He has left us with that lack of knowledge again and we don't know "what took place that fateful day."  All Hall leaves us with is the enigma of exactly what happened to his friend.  "Some say they saw him near the tracks at furnace No 1 With heat so hot the hubs of hell would seem just barely warm Well, they never saw my friend again did he do something wrong While the rolling mills of Middletown Ohio roll on, roll on, roll on."  He has left us with the friend's last known location "near the tracks at furnace No 1 With heat so hot the hubs of hell would seem just barely warm".  We do know that the friend was near the furnace which is described in that incredibly grapic line "With heat so hot the hubs of hell would seem just barely warm".  By using the words "hubs of hell" Hall has also inserted a reminder of the puritanical vision of Hell as a punishment for suicide which is often considered to be an unpardonable sin.  Just as we must come to our own conclusions about Billy Joe and the narrator in the previous song, we also must reach our own conclusions about the subject of Hall's wonderful suicide song.  The natural assumption is that either the distraught husband "did something wrong"  or that he deliberately walked into the death zone of the furnace.  No matter how you personally believe the man responded to his wife's infidelity, you have to conclude that it is a fine suicide song by one of the world's great songwriters.


Another of my favorite song writers of all time in both Country and Bluegrass Music is Dolly Parton who has written numerous songs in categories which I loosely call "Songs For Social Workers".  She wrote and recorded a song called "The Bridge" about a young pregnant woman who is contemplating suicide and that song is narrated in the first person. "You kissed me for the first time here An' held me awfully tight And the bridge became our favorite place We came here often in the night."  Parton, who is a songwriter in that same class among the greatest in both genres as is Tom T. Hall, has told us that the affair began on the bridge and she raises the symbolism of darkness by saying  "We came here often in the night".  And that mention of the night is naturally a premonition of the young woman's death.  The concluding stanza clearly leaves us knowing that the narrator has committed suicide when she says:   "To think that you could leave me here My heart is beating wild  Tonight, while standing on the bridge With our unborn child My feet are moving slowly Closer to the edge Here is where it started And here is where I'll end it....  Parton has left us with no doubt that her young, pregnant narrator will "end it" and step off the bridge to her death before her fatherless child can be born.  Interestingly, this song is only one of several which Parton has written and recorded about young women who become pregnant by men who later desert them although all the other female characters in those songs do not commit suicide.
 

A Young Dolly Parton--Photo by Good Housekeeping

While every singer and songwriter in Country and Bluegrass Music does not perform or write songs about suicide, enough of such songs have been written and recorded by musicians and writers in the two genres to make the subject of suicide a common theme in both types of music.  And both Dolly Parton and Tom T. Hall have strong histories and lifelong commitments to both genres.  Each of them has written and performed for many decades in both genres.  Both have written numerous songs in each genre which are among the best known in all of American music.  I am sure that we will never see the end of suicide as a subject in both Country and Bluegrass. 

"Poetry II" edited by Lillie D. Chaffin--Book Review

Lillie D. Chaffin served as the editor of this little pamphlet of 23 pages and was a Kentucky Poet Laureate and a literature award in the name of her and her husband is still being awarded by Morehead State University.  She was the author of several chap books and the Appalachian children's book "We Be Warm Till Springtime Comes", which is one of my favorites in all of Appalachian Literature.  This book we are discussing here was published under the name of Poetry Press, Pikeville, Kentucky, and I suspect was only issued in a small number of copies, most likely less than 1,000.  It also may very well have been self-published in some cooperative arrangement by the poets included.  It will be difficult to locate if you decide you want to try to find a copy.  I bought it in a pile of rare Appalachian books and pamphlets out of a partial estate a friend of mine bought in Morgan County Kentucky.  The stated theme of the poetry is "Marriage" which is not in the title on the cover but is on the inside cover as a part of the publication information.  

The only poet of any note besides Lillie D. Chaffin to be included is Jane Stuart, the daughter of Jesse Stuart.  In my estimation, her poem is not particularly good.  The list of other poets includes Mildred Williams Boggs, Camella Joy Schreyer Thompson, Lois Duncan, Rae Cross, Jan Faires, Frederika Blankner, Jan Seale, Lena Winston, Lyn Lifshin, Thelma Scott Kiser, Phyllis Maples, Travis, Du Priest, Nell Abbott, Mary Newton Baldwin, Florence Holmes Ryan, L. R. Wagner, Fred W. Wright Jr., and Harry Brown.  I always try to include a full author list when I locate and write about these small edition books and pamphlets since it is sometimes possible that surviving family members of authors will not even know that the writing by their family member ever saw print.  If you turn out to be one of those people with a connection to an author, I sincerely hope you locate a copy.  

For me, the best poem in the book is "Discovery After Marriage" by Lois Duncan.  It is composed of four stanzas with a loose and irregular rhyming pattern which occurs in only part of the lines.  But it is well worth reading.  The first stanza reads: 

"I, who was never beautiful before you came,

I, who turned my face when loveliness passed by, 

Oh, suddenly there is nothing in the world as beautiful as I!"  

The poem then progresses through two more stanzas describing how a body "which has lain asleep so long...could be stirred to flame."  That is a good way to end a stanza about improved self image if I ever saw one.  

The fourth and concluding stanza reads:

"I am a silent bird who finds that it can sing.

I am a tree who stood all winter long with branches cold and bare

And now I wake, and it is spring."  

In my opinion, that is poetry worth reading.  If you find a copy of this little pamphlet somewhere, preserve it, read it, enjoy it, and pass it on to someone else with similar interests when you feel ready to die.  Or donate it to the special collections department of some Appalachian college library. 

Cratis D. Williams and I On Death, Dying, and Funeral Rituals In Appalachia

I am currently reading "Tales From Sacred Wind: Coming of Age in Appalachia" by Cratis D. Williams and I will write about it more fully in a more formal kind of book review when I finish it.  But I have just read some important sections of the book about the deaths of various people in the Sacred Wind community of Lawrence County Kentucky in the book and they prompted some memories of my own which led me to write about that aspect of Williams's observations and to insert some of my own.  I also wrote another post about "Tales From Sacred Wind..." since I posted this one which has also become quite popular with lovers of Appalachia and Appalachian History and folkways. It is about both our experiences as children in traditional Appalachian children's games.  At the time I wrote these two most recent posts about Cratis Williams, I neglected to mention in either of them that I had written a much earlier post called "Responses To Some Reading Of Cratis Williams" which might also be interesting to some of you.  It is a response to a small pamphlet he wrote about his most important early teacher, William H. Vaughan, who was a primary influence in leading Williams to pursue a career in academia which was not common at the time in Eastern Kentucky. 

Cratis D. Williams--Photo by The Williams Family

I have written previously on this blog about these topics but the practices in Appalachia have been ever changing in both my lifetime and that of Cratis Williams who was born about forty years before me and has now been dead for thirty-five years.  Cratis Williams was one of the premier scholars in the field of Appalachian Studies and served in various capacities at Appalachian State University.  The best, and perhaps only book, devoted solely to death, dying, and burial practices in Appalachia is "Death and Dying In Central Appalachia" by James K. Crissman.  But it was published in 1994 and is becoming a bit dated twenty-six years later.  "Tales From Sacred Wind..." was published in 2003 based on manuscripts which Cratis Williams had left unpublished at his death in 1985 and is also a bit dated.  There is a genuine need for a more recent scholarly look at death and dying in the region.  Crissman's book is excellent, well researched, professionally documented, and wide ranging in its coverage and I have cited, quoted, and recommended it for many years.  But the work of Williams in "Tales From Sacred Wind.." provides a brief but needed addition to the work of Crissman.  I hope my own observations from a long life in Appalachia also contribute to the field.  

My primary impetus to write about Williams's observations came about quite serendipitously shortly after I read his section on death practices through an e-mail exchange with a new acquaintance about a cemetery in our native Knott County which both of us have known all our lives.  I grew up near that cemetery and my acquaintance has several relatives buried on it.  In his book, Cratis Williams tells a story about one of his elderly female ancestors who planted two cedar trees beside some graves on a cemetery at Sacred Wind.  The old woman would not allow anyone else to assist her in planting the trees and expressed an old folk belief that the person who plants a cedar tree will die before the tree is fully grown.  As my e-mail exchange progressed with my acquaintance about the Knott County cemetery, he said this: "My grandfather died in (a) mining accident in 1948, and my grandmother later moved to Michigan. Her last visit to this cemetery was in 1974. During that visit, she planted some cedar trees near the grave of my grandfather. She told me  there was an old saying, that if you planted a cedar tree, you would be dead by time the tree was large enough to shade a grave.  My grandmother died five years later, in 1979. The cedar trees are still standing, and are posing problems to headstones due to their roots."  It is always fascinating to me to read, and especially to hear first hand, about any Appalachian folkway or folk tale.

Another friend of mine, both on Facebook and in real life, John D. Shelton, responded to this post after I had posted it on Facebook with this story about planting cedar trees which concurs almost exactly with Cratis Williams's story and the one above from my other acquaintance.  "As a teen, I was going to plant a Cedar Tree my Uncle scolded me saying never plant Cedars, because you will die when they are big enuff to shade your Grave."  Obviously, the folkway or folktale about planting cedars and impending death of the planter has spread across a wide area.  

Williams also discussed several funerals he had attended both as a child and as an adult in Lawrence County including the deaths of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.  He even discusses one funeral which his entire one room school attended for the father of a classmate who had died from "lockjaw", tetanus, after having stepped on a nail while tearing down a house.  He discusses the man having been buried in a shroud or winding cloth only one of which such funerals I have ever known about in my life.  A man who owned property adjoining ours in my childhood home and, in fact, adjoining the cemetery which my acquaintance and I have been discussing was the only person I ever knew who was buried in a shroud or winding cloth and I did not attend that funeral which I regret.  For those of you who have not encountered either term, a shroud or winding cloth is a plain flat, usually white, garment or sheet in which a dead body is wrapped in the casket.  As I understand it, a full sized or larger sheet was used in most cases and the body was placed with the feet a foot or two above a corner with the head a foot or two below the diagonally opposite corner in order to increase the length and folding options of the shroud or winding cloth.  The washed and prepared body was then wrapped in the cloth usually beginning with a fold of the lower corner over the feet up to about the knees.  Then one side was folded over and possibly under the body and the other side was folded in the opposite direction in the same manner.  Usually after a viewing, visitation, or funeral, the top corner was then folded down to cover the face of the deceased.  It is my understanding that in some other countries, especially in the Middle East, this is still the dominant method in use.  In Appalachia, America, and several other countries, the use of white cloth is, of course, a symbol of purity.

Cratis Williams also discussed having known people who had their coffins made while they were alive and storing them in attics, barns, or spare rooms.  In an earlier post on this blog, I wrote about Clabe Mosley, an Old Regular Baptist preacher, whose coffin hung in the attic of my maternal grandparents' house for several years before he actually died.  Williams, in this book, also concurs with my writing that these people who had coffins built while living would sometimes actually get in and test the coffin as I reported that Clabe Mosley had done.  John D. Shelton also relayed this story about a person who had their coffin made well before they died and allowed the coffin to deteriorate in a fence row before his death.  But others, after the death, repaired the coffin and used it to bury the original buyer.  "I had another relative who was poor, so he built his own Casket and painted it, tried it for size, placed it in the Grave Yard fence row, it sat there many years covered in grass and weeds, no one moved it, he died and a Cousin and Preacher dug it out the weeds and cleaned it and made repairs, and a woman from Church made a cloth lining, and he was buried in it. This happened a few years back."

Cratis Williams also discussed grave houses in "Tales From Sacred Wind..." as I did in my post about burial practices in Appalachia in which I also included a few photos none of which are originally shot by me.  One of the funnier stories in the book is about a distant relative of Williams who, after getting drunk at a square dance, decided to crawl in the grave house of an ancestor to avoid walking home in the rain.  The man was awakened and terrified by an old sow and her pigs when the sow decided to use the grave house to scratch an itch.  Williams's relative thought he was experiencing a "hain't" and left the cemetery in terror until he realized it was only a sow.  I know of a couple of grave houses on a small cemetery near the Johnson/Lawrence county line on US 23 which are clearly visible from the divided highway.  I also know a few in Lawrence and Elliott counties in an are near where Williams grew up.

Williams also discussed, and his posthumous editors provided several photos of his grandfather David O. Williams who had a large stone, homemade mausoleum, or grave house built to hold the bodies of himself and his wife.  I know of one hand cut stone grave house of a similar nature at a small cemetery between Mousie and Lackey in Knott County Kentucky which is unmarked and said to contain the body of one of the first white settlers to that area.  That stone grave house has several cracks and openings where the stones have settled over the years and I have to admit that I have been tempted to return with a flashlight to see what is visible through the cracks.  I also know of a similarly constructed grave house in a small cemetery near Morgan County High School in West Liberty, Kentucky which also shows signs of settling and age. John D. Shelton, whom I mentioned above, also reported this anecdote about a grave house he had seen: "There is one Grave Yard in Clinton County (Kentucky) which has a little House on one Grave about four feet tall that has Windows in it, I guess they wanted the Loved one to get Sun and be able to see out."

I am thoroughly enjoying reading this book and regret that I was never able to meet Cratis Williams in the flesh.  He is funny, informative, at times risque, and well worth reading.  "Tales From Sacred Wind..." is a book which ever student of Appalachian Studies should place on their "Must Read List".