High Mountains Rising (34 page)

1.
John C. Campbell,
The Southern Highlander and His Homeland
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1922), xxi.

2.
James B. McMillan and Michael B. Montgomery, eds.,
Annotated Bibliography of Southern American English
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989)
includes more than four hundred items on various aspects of southern Appalachian English.

3.
“Tales from Fisher's River,”
Simple Pleasures
, Aug. 1988, pp. 2, 25.

4.
Before this time the larger mountain region generally lacked an encompassing name, with reference instead being made to the mountains or “backcountry” of individual states. For an account of developing consciousness of the region, see Henry D. Shapiro,
Appalachia on Our Minds: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978).

5.
Mary Noailles Murfree,
The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), 275. “Eye dialect” is visual but not real dialect, that is, words spelled as if to represent dialect but that in reality reflect their common pronunciation (e.g.,
enuf, likker, sez).

6.
Linda Blanton, “Southern Appalachia: Social Considerations of Speech,” in
Toward a Social History of American English
, ed. J. L. Dillard (The Hague: Mouton, 1985), 75. If Americans often associate portrayals of mountain speech with
Snuffy Smith
(originally titled
Barney Google)
, this is not hard to understand; the primary source of the comic strip's language and shenanigans is George Washington Harris's tales of Sut Lovingood. See M. Thomas Inge, “The Appalachian Backgrounds of Billy de Beck's Snuffy Smith,”
Appalachian Journal
4 (1977): 120–32.

7.
Bruce A. Rosenberg,
The Art of the American Folk Preacher
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

8.
James Robert Reese, “The Myth of the Southern Appalachian Dialect as a Mirror of the Mountaineer,” in
Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings on Southern Appalachia
, ed. Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose N. Manning (New York: Ungar, 1975), 490–91.

9.
Walt Wolfram, “On the Linguistic Study of Appalachian Speech,”
Appalachian Journal
5 (1977): 92–102.

10.
John Fox Jr., “The Southern Mountaineer,”
Scribner's Magazine
29 (1901): 394–95.

11.
Joseph S. Hall, “Mountain Speech in the Great Smokies,”
NPS Popular Study Series
5 (1941): 12.

12.
The principal work in this school is Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian,
Appalachian Speech
(Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1976).

13.
See Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, “The Language Frontier in Appalachia,”
Appalachian Notes
5 (1977): 33–41; Wolfram and Christian, “On the Application of Sociolinguistic Information: Test Evaluation and Dialect Differences in Appalachia,” in
Standards and Dialects in English
, ed. Timothy Shopen and Joseph M. Williams (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1980), 177–212.

14.
Hans Kurath,
A Word Geography of the Eastern United States
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1949).

15.
Ibid., 13.

16.
Ibid., 28. Kurath identifies six terms as “North Midland” and five (
jacket
[“vest”],
fireboard, milk gap, sugar orchard
, and
clabber milk)
as “South Midland.”

17.
Hans Kurath and Raven I. McDavid Jr.,
Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 18–19.

18.
Craig M. Carver,
American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), 176–78.

19.
Frederic G. Cassidy et al., eds.,
Dictionary of American Regional English
, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 1985– ).

20.
Carver,
American Regional Dialects
, 177–78. Carver does not recognize the Midland dialect region and prefers “Upper South” for the subregion others call the “South Midland.”

21.
Walt Wolfram, “Is There an ‘Appalachian English'?”
Appalachian Journal
11 (1984): 215–24.

22.
Blanton, “Southern Appalachia,” 88.

23.
For the most in-depth examination of the variety's origins, see Michael Montgomery, “Exploring the Roots of Appalachian English,”
English World-Wide
10 (1989): 227–78; Montgomery, “The Scotch-Irish Influence on Appalachian English: How Broad? How Deep?” in
Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch-Irish
, ed. H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 189–212.

24.
For a detailed assessment, see Michael Montgomery, “In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare,” in
Myths in Linguistics
, ed. Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (New York: Penguin, 1998), 66–76.

25.
This percentage is higher than for most other varieties, but it indicates that the foremost component of Appalachian speech is its new vocabulary. Both borrowings and inventions, these additions have been a constant necessity as speakers of American English have faced new realities and challenges of environment, culture, and so on.

26.
Edgar W. Schneider, “Appalachian Vocabulary: Its Character, Sources, and Distinctiveness,” in
Verhandlungen des Internationalen Dialektologenkongresses Bamberg 1990
, Vol. 3, ed. Wolfgang Viereck (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994), 498–512.

27.
Michael E. Ellis, “The Relationship of Appalachian English with the British Regional Dialects” (M.A. thesis, East Tennessee State University, 1984), 42.

28.
Montgomery, “Scotch-Irish Influence.”

29.
Michael Montgomery, “How Scotch-Irish Is Your English?”
Journal of East Tennessee History
67 (1996): 1–33.

30.
Much of the English of Ulster is shared with northern England and Scotland and is, historically speaking, derived from those regions.

31.
Michael Adams, “Lexical Doppelgängers,”
Journal of English Linguistics
28 (2000): 295–310.

32.
No community of Gaelic language speakers has been documented in Appalachia.

33.
Anita Puckett,
Seldom Ask, Never Tell: Labor and Discourse in Appalachia
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

34.
Ted Roland Ledford, “Folk Vocabulary of Western North Carolina: Some Recent Changes,”
Appalachian Journal
3 (1976): 277–84.

35.
“Myth” refers to a traditional account or explanation of a cultural practice or idea. It affirms some of a society's deepest beliefs and reveals something about those who hold it. See Michael Montgomery, “Myths: How a Hunger for Roots Shapes Our Notions about Appalachian English,”
Now and Then: The Appalachian Magazine
17:2 (Summer 2000): 7–13.

36.
Durwood Dunn,
Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988).

37.
Anita Puckett, “On the Pronunciation of
Appalachia,” Now and Then: The Appalachian Magazine
17 (Summer 2000): 25–29.

12

Literature

Ted Olson

In a 1977 article surveying Appalachian literature through the 1970s, scholar and author Jim Wayne Miller illuminated a dilemma inherent in interpreting the literary heritage of Appalachia, a dilemma that has challenged scholars since the early 1960s, when initial attempts were made to assess the existence of a distinctively “Appalachian” literary canon distinguishable from the literature of the American South. Should the main focus of Appalachian literary study be on the works themselves (that is, should we analyze creative writings from the region or by regional authors primarily to discern their qualities as literary works)? Or might Appalachian literature also be mined for sociological reflection on the region's cultural life? Without denying the utility of regional literary works for providing information on Appalachian society, Miller cautioned that literary renderings of Appalachian culture are not precisely sociological representations: “Sociologists have found . . . that traditional Appalachian life is characterized to a striking degree by traits such as adult-centeredness, personalism, familism, individualism, attachment to place, and religious fundamentalism. . . . But these traits only become interesting to the literary historian or critic when in literary works they are raised to aesthetic significance as insight into character or as an indispensable part of a literary structure.”
¹

Whether or not Miller is right in asserting that aesthetic readings of Appalachian literary works should necessarily supersede sociological interpretations, Miller's 1977 article eloquently identified two major justifications for studying the Appalachian literary canon from a historical perspective: “Tracing the breaks, reversals, and continuities in interpretations of Appalachia through the literature can contribute both to our understanding and appreciation of the literature itself and to our understanding of the evolving relationship of the region to the rest of the country.”
²

Surprisingly, Miller's 1977 article is the most recent comprehensive survey of Appalachian literature. Certainly, Miller's article and the other previously published overviews exploring the region's literary history are
outdated today. Continuing the effort begun by previous scholars, this chapter endeavors to trace the evolution of Appalachian literature from the earliest English-language writings about the region through relevant literary works published at the end of the twentieth century. When addressing literary works written since 1977, I will attempt to elucidate the new themes— as well as the reinterpretations of older themes—that reflect more recent socioeconomic changes within and outside the region. Duly noted will be significant developments in the critical and popular receptions of Appalachian literature, whether works by individual authors or the region's literary canon as a whole.

The earliest and most ambitious of the previously published efforts to survey Appalachian literature was Cratis Williams's 1961 dissertation “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction,” which has long been one of the most influential texts in the interdisciplinary field of Appalachian studies. Williams's dissertation was not a truly comprehensive study of the region's literature; he assessed representations of Appalachian people and culture exclusively in novels and narrative nonfiction works published through the 1950s and ignored nonnarrative literary genres (e.g., certain types of nonfiction, poetry, lyric songs).

W. D. Weatherford's and Wilma Dykeman's impressionistic 1962 essay in
The Southern Appalachian Region:
A
Survey
(edited by Thomas R. Ford) investigated a wider range of literary genres than did Williams's dissertation, yet the former is more problematic from a scholarly standpoint. While accounting for a wide range of literary works about the region or by regional authors through the 1950s, Weatherford's and Dykeman's essay expressed positions that are today considered romantic or fallacious. For example, claiming that “the traditional folk arts may well find their last refuge between the covers of a few books,” Weatherford and Dykeman inadvertently endorsed the practice of literary “fakelore” found in many twentieth-century books about Appalachia. When discussing Richard Chase's
The Jack Tales
(1943) and
Grandfather Tales
(1948), Weatherford and Dykeman declared that Chase's collections of texts from those two Appalachian story cycles “record as faithfully as possible the way these stories sound when they are spoken by the human voice rather than the way they look when they are read on the printed page,” overlooking the fact that Chase's published versions of those stories from the oral tradition were self-consciously folksy montages of oral texts collected originally from multiple storytellers.
³
From a present-day vantage point, Chase's texts were not authentic transcriptions from the Appalachian oral tradition but instead were stylized literary approximations of Appalachian speech.

The most influential compilations of Appalachia-related writings have
been the single-volume
Voices from the Hills
(1975) and the two-volume
Appalachia Inside Out
(1995); both anthologies were edited by Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose N. Manning, with assistance from Jim Wayne Miller on the latter. Combining “creative writing” about the region with texts primarily of sociological interest, both of those anthologies provided a diverse selection of writings that showcased a variety of regionally relevant themes and issues; neither anthology traced the historical evolution of Appalachian literature.