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Play of a Fiddle: Traditional Music, Dance, and Folklore in West Virginia
Play of a Fiddle gives voice to people who steadfastly hold to and build on the folk traditions of their ancestors. While encountering the influences of an increasingly overwhelming popular culture, the men and women in this book follow age-old patterns of folklife and custom, making their own music and dance in celebration of them. Shedding new light on a region that maintains ties to the cultural identities of its earliest European and African inhabitants, Gerald Milnes shows how folk music in West Virginia borrowed rhythmic, melodic, and vocal forms from the Celtic, Anglo, Germanic, and African traditions. These elements ...Read More
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It All Happened in Renfro Valley
For sixty years, Renfro Valley has highlighted some of the biggest and most influential names in country and folk music. The show began in the 1930s as a combination radio broadcast and stage performance, and today it has grown into an array of shows and headliner concerts featuring old-time country music, country gospel, modern country, bluegrass, and comedy acts. John Lair, the ambitious and deeply committed founder of Renfro Valley, was fascinated with the past. He created the Renfro Valley Barn Dance to give radio listeners the experience of an old-fashioned rural hoe-down. He resisted the encroachment of popular "cowboy ...Read More
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Savory Memories
Writers love to tell stories, so when L. Elisabeth Beattie remarked that her next book ought to be a Kentucky writers' cookbook, Betty Layman Receveur replied, "Actually, all my sons ever demand of me is my pound cake." Adding a cup of this and a pinch of that, Beattie cooked up Savory Memories, a collection of twenty-two essays about particular dishes that call up warm memories in the writers.
Featuring recipes and memories from writers such as Joy Bale Boone, George Ella Lyon, Ronni Ludy, Ed McClanahan, Sena Jeter Naslund, and Richard Taylor, this is both a cookbook and a ...Read More
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Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers
Winner of the North Carolina Society of Historians Award Jane Hicks Gentry lived her entire life in the remote, mountainous northwest corner of North Carolina and was descended from old Appalachian families in which singing and storytelling were part of everyday life. Gentry took this tradition to heart, and her legacy includes ballads, songs, stories, and riddles. Smith provides a full biography of this vibrant woman and the tradition into which she was born, presenting seventy of Gentry’s songs and fifteen of the “Jack” tales she learned from her grandfather. When Englishman Cecil Sharp traveled through the South gathering material ...Read More
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Tobacco Culture: Farming Kentucky's Burley Belt
Whereas most crops drive farmers apart as they compete for the best prices, the price controls on tobacco bring growers together. The result is a culture unlike any other in America, one often forgotten or overlooked as federal and state governments fight over the spoils of the tobacco settlement. Tobacco Culture describes the process of raising a crop of burley from the perspective and experience of the farmers themselves. In the process of gathering information for the book, the authors performed most steps in the tobacco production process, from dropping plants, burning seedbeds, topping, and cutting to stripping and baling ...Read More
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Payne Hollow Journal
An intimate and inspiring testament by Kentucky's own Thoreau, Hubbard's journals record a life lived in harmony with nature. The third and climactic volume, Payne Hollow Journal, contains entries from the years he and his wife, Anna, lived at their Payne Hollow home along the Ohio River's Kentucky shore.
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Revolution and Ideology: Images of the Mexican Revolution in the United States
Mexico and the United States share a border of more than 2,000 miles, and their histories and interests have often intertwined. The Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910 and continued in one form or another for the next thirty years, was keenly observed by U.S. citizens, especially those directly involved in Mexico through property ownership, investment, missionary work, tourism, journalism, and education. It differed from many other revolutions in this century in that Marxist-Leninist theory was only one of many radical and reformist influences.
Historian John A. Britton examines contemporary accounts written by Americans commenting on social upheaval south ...Read More
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Towboat on the Ohio
To get a personal look at what it is like to work on the Ohio River, newspaperman James E. Casto spent eight days aboard the Blazer as it traveled the Ohio from Huntington, West Virginia, to Pittsburgh, up the Allegheny and the Mongahela, and then back to Huntington. The Paul G. Blazer, a gleaming white towboat owned and operated by Ashland Oil, pushes a group—or “tow,” as the rivermen call it—of nine barges on this trip. Along the way, Casto introduces us to Captain Ronnie Davis, pilot Ronnie Burge, engineer Steve Bellomy, the mates, the deckhands, and the cook, as ...Read More
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Rock Fences of the Bluegrass
Gray rock fences built of ancient limestone are hallmarks of Kentucky’s Bluegrass landscape. Why did Kentucky farmers turn to rock as fence-building material when most had earlier used hardwood rails? Who were the masons responsible for Kentucky’s lovely rock fences and what are the different rock forms used in this region?
In this generously illustrated book, Carolyn Murray-Wooley and Karl Raitz address those questions and explore the background of Kentucky’s rock fences, the talent and skill of the fence masons, and the Irish and Scottish models they followed in their work. They also correct inaccurate popular perceptions about the fences ...Read More
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Shantyboat on the Bayous
Since the publication of Shantyboat: A River Way of Life in 1953, Harlan Hubbard achieved a wide reputation as a modern-day Thoreau. Not content simply to advocate a life of simplicity and self-sufficiency, Hubbard and his wife Anna in 1944 built with their own hands a houseboat on the banks of the Ohio near Cincinnati and in 1946 set out on a leisurely, five-year journey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Shantyboat, Hubbard’s recounting of their journey to New Orleans, and Payne Hollow: Life on the Fringe of Society, his sequel telling of their life in a corner of rural ...Read More
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