- Edgar
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- Nov 07, 2020
Appalachian Quotes
On the region's music, history, and hard-to-shake labels.
Musicians here describe Appalachian harmonies and old-style falsetto singing as spontaneous and hard to fake, while a writer pushes back on being boxed in by the regional label itself. There's also a nod to the real 1957 Appalachian Meeting that exposed organized crime.
- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
- Music
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've spent hours and hours doing research into Appalachian folk music. My grandfather was a fiddler. There is something very immediate, very simple and emotional, about that music.
- Home
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- Nov 07, 2020
Born Virginia Marshall but nicknamed Gig, my mother was a home economics teacher who had come all the way across the whole state of Virginia, from her home on the Eastern Shore to our little Appalachian coal town to marry my daddy, Ernest Smith, whose family had lived in these mountains for generations.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
Those old Appalachian singers use a falsetto sometimes. They can change their voices to sound high or low or really scratchy. When you're singing, usually you're trying to express some kind of pain or joy. I think that voice allows me to do a lot more of that.
- Comfort
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- Nov 07, 2020
I grew up at the base of a mountain in Virginia, so my comfort zone is that Appalachian area, where all the dudes wear Carhartt and all the women can put on a beautiful sweater with a snowman applique and nobody raises an eyebrow.
- Mood
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- Nov 07, 2020
When Merle and I started out we called our music 'traditional plus,' meaning the traditional music of the Appalachian region plus whatever other styles we were in the mood to play.
- Family
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- Nov 07, 2020
My family influenced me very deeply because my dad came from a musical background, from the hillbilly music part of it, and all that music came over from Scotland and Ireland and England in to the Appalachian Mountains and Ozark Mountains, where I was raised.
- Mind
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- Nov 07, 2020
While writing 'Cold Mountain,' I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. He's much the same Jack who climbs the beanstalk, vulnerable and clever and opportunistic.
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.
- Hot
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- Nov 07, 2020