Essays on Appalachians

"I'm glad there's some folks gettin' interested in the old ways. This new generation don't know such things, but when they find the old songs and the tales, they'll delight in them." --Granny in Grandfather Tales (Chase & Williams, 1948) The Southern Appalachian region has a rich heritage of folklore and songs passed down orally from European immigrants settling in the mountain range situated from New York to Georgia (Abramson & Haskell, 2006) from the 18th to the 20th centuries (Hanlon, 2000). Since the middle of the 20th century, variations of the folktales have been compared to publications such as Grandfather ...

Appalachia is a region lying in Eastern North America. The significance of this region’s geographical boundaries do not exist only because of the legally defined limits; rather it is the region’s historical, cultural and environmental conditions of the Appalachian region (The Alliance for Appalachia). The history of the region is quite unique. The region is known for the predominant coal mining activities that take place there but before the coal miners and current inhabitants took over the area, it was home to the Cherokee. They traveled north and east from the land known today as North and ...

Eureka mill: poetry

Eureka Mill is Ron Rash’s first poetry book which comprises of 42 poems. The poems in the book reflect on the lives of Appalachian famers who worked in a mill village near Chester, South Carolina. The poems in the books go into detail about the lives of the mill workers, the community and the town. For instance, in the poem preparing the body, Rash discusses the ritual of preparing a dead man’s body in the region (Rash 1-4). In his poem the fighting gamecocks, Rash explains how men in the community enjoyed watching fighting birds because the game was ...