There are many ways to approach this question, and many reasons that could be cited very easily. Blair Mountain is a site of historic significance. It is home to a diversity of wildlife and plant life, a unique mountain with its own stories, its own echoes and waves of memory woven by ages of earth, human and animal experience. It has significance and placement in the greater bioregions of Southern Appalachia, and must be saved for the health of its ecological community.
Blair’s significance can be measured in all the different ways we think about it as a place and in turn how this knowledge places us. Its many identities will be a focus of exploration for the Blair Pathways Project, but today I want to back up a little bit more to answer this question in a more basic way:
Why does this project exist? How did we, Jordan and I, become motivated to create it? All the decisions one makes in life are in the end determined by our emotions, not our logic, and so I want to illustrate some of the emotional ties that have brought me to work on this project.
My grandfather, or Papaw, grew up in the coal fields of north-eastern, TN in a town called La Follette about 30 minutes from the Kentucky line. In my late teens, as I became more involved in mountain-top removal activism, Papaw started telling me long stories of the coal wars that went on in the valley in which he grew up. He never quite stated his views one way or another, though his father did own a coal mine with workers who chose to strike a time or two, and not without injuries on both sides. What struck me about those stories is how pervasive the violence seemed to be, no matter what “side” he was talking about. Mine owners, workers, union organizers, townsfolk all participated in levels of cruelty that were shocking to hear about. I resolved to learn more about the complexity of these narratives as I continued to participate in MTR-activism.
My papaw was not only a good talker, he also enjoyed singing. Being a Methodist minister, he knew a good deal of hymn tunes. One day while sitting with him I began to sing a song called “Hick’s Farewell.” Written by Rev. Berriman Hicks in the early 1800s as he lay sick with fever, the song is a mournful goodbye to his children, wife and fellow preachers (turns out he recovered and went on to live for many more years). As I sang the verses, my Papaw joined in with me. And when I finished the song my Mamaw, poking her head in from the next room, said “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you sing those words in all my life.” Papaw would later cite a few possibilities of where he had learned the tune- from an itinerant shape-note master, or down by the water where people gathered to play music, but what he was certain of was that he had heard the song in childhood and had never recalled it again until that moment when I sang it with him.
Our memory for music is subtle yet instinctive. It has a vibrancy that even while waiting in the background of our thoughts, shakes and trembles with anticipation to be brought out again. In the last months of my Papaw’s life, as he was losing much of his memory, music could ground him in powerful ways. He could sing Amazing Grace and laugh at humorous folk tunes when nothing else would calm him down or help him focus. While the rest of his memories seemed like a twisting cyclone inside his mind, unyielding and oppressive, music was the eye of the storm in which he could find momentary peace.
This is my impetus for the Blair Pathways Project. The long memory, as Utah Phillips would say, is one of the most radical ideas in the U.S. today. This project will bring the songs of Blair Mountain and labor struggle in Appalachia to the surface of our collective memories, move them again into our voices, our hands and feet so that they may be known again for more generations to come. If we want Blair’s Story to be remembered, we can use its music to stir us to action and heal us too, not just now but for the rest of our lives.
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In Solidarity and Song,
Saro
“My loving wife, my bosom friend, the object of my love.
The time’s been sweet I’ve spent with you, my sweet my harmless dove.
Though I must now depart from you, let this not grieve your heart.
For you and I will surely meet, where we shall never part.” – excerpt from Hick’s Farewell
Download the CD on Bandcamp below!
