Black Mountain
Kentucky
July 2011
Literally more than a ton of country music performers come from eastern Kentucky, appropriately nicknamed the Bluegrass State: Loretta Lynn, Wynonna Judd, Naomi Judd, Billy Ray Cyrus, Tom T Hall, Ricky Skaggs, Patty Loveless, Crystal Gayle, Bill Monroe, Dwight Yoakam and a number of other talents. That’s a lot of twangin’ and fiddlin’ and broken hearts and philosophizin’.
We approach Black Mountain in Kentucky from the east, after having climbed Mount Rogers, the high point of Virginia. Soon enough, we pick up US Route 23 which is known as the Country Music Highway. Choose to drive this 144-mile long throughway and you will pass amphitheaters, arts and exposition centers, museums, an Opry, theaters and festivals, all devoted to country music and its culture. Turn off your radio and listen closely. You might hear some balladry just floating in the air. Probably every one of the musicians I’ve mentioned has performed somewhere along US-23.
Ashley Judd, born in Los Angeles, formed and refined in Kentucky, gives us a flavor of this region…
Tough girls come from New York. Sweet girls, they’re from Georgia. But us Kentucky girls, we have fire and ice in our blood. We can ride horses, be a debutante, throw left hooks and drink with the boys, all the while making sweet tea, darlin’. And if we have an opinion, you know you’re gonna hear it.
There is a lot more here than just “three chords and the truth,” as Harlan Howard described country music. The story of eastern Kentucky is a big part of the story of America’s push west, once folks crossed the Appalachian Mountains. It was the stage for Civil War battles and also for the famed original Hatfield-McCoy Feud. These two families fought it out for 28 years in the West Virginia-Kentucky backcountry, right here in this neighborhood, just a skosh north of the high point of the Kentucky.
When Abraham Lincoln was president, he stressed the importance of keeping border states from seceding from the Union. He said, “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.”
Country music is woven into the texture of Kentucky culture, as well as all of America. Coal too plays a major role in this region. Rich underlying seams have enabled a significant industry in mining and extraction, and furnished many tens of thousands of jobs over the years. But this was not a harmonious avocation; the coal company had its own police force, often used to keep union organizers away from the workers and to intimidate miners who might have tried to join the union. Some of the tactics were vicious, both on the parts of the police and the miners, and Harlan County, where you find the highest geographical point in the state, became known as “Bloody Harlan.”
During the early 1930s and again in the early 1970s, there were particularly incendiary strikes by the coal workers which involved violent fights, beatings, the shooting of guns and even a few murders. Lots of name-calling and lying and cheating and general malevolence. There are residents living in this area today who are still bitter.
Strikes and riots did not stop the large scale mining though. As Lisa and I drive up the mountain on route 160 from Virginia, we can easily see the stripping of the hillside across the valley to the east. This surface mining is about as ugly as it gets but it is far enough away, both physically, politically and environmentally, that the geometric contours have a picturesque, artsy look.
Let’s pause for a moment to recall the land before the mining began. Here is The Peace of Wild Things, written by Wendell Berry, who was born and still lives in Henry County, Kentucky…
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Into this environment Lisa and I go, in our silly little, extraordinary quest to get to the high point. Best we can tell, all, presently, is quiet.
Or rather, listen to the country music. It too can bring you the peace of wild things.