In 1916, a young girl started a new hobby, which was the collection of wise-sounding statements and philosophic proclamations. She insisted that her son should continue her hobby, and he did. I even agreed with her that I would, one day, publish them in book format so the rest of the world could enjoy them as much as we did. Well, the time is now, and this is the book that she always wanted to write yet never did. She preferred that I, a budding newspaper man, should have the honor. In 2013, I finally got around to publishing all these collected testimonials. Some of which are more than one hundred years old and even beyond, since some were already old when she first wrote them down on bits of paper. Mom died in 2002, a proud woman of ninety-two. And I wish beyond all else that she could sit in her porch swing at 125 Combs Street in Hazard, Kentucky, and read some of her fondest memories that Trafford Press has kindly agreed to publish. I know that she is in heaven and probably teaching other urbane angels how it was in the hill country way back then. Thanks, Mom. Your old sayings helped to make me the man that I am.

Stepping through time to past and present communities, settled in deep hollows and surrounded by ridges and mountains in Tennessee's Appalachia, is to confront a different and disappearing realm. Travel along Hogskin and Richland Valleys. Visit Frenches Mill and Dulaney General Store while passing cantilever barns, one-room school buildings and steepled churches. Listen as octogenarians Robert, Charles, Glenn and others explain life without electricity. Former Cades Cove residents Lois and Inez tell stories of living in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park before it was a national park. Authors Fred Brown, retired journalist, and Harry Moore, retired geologist, explore Tennessee's Appalachian region, recalling its culture, land and people before it vanishes into the abyss of time.

Collects more than 1,400 English-language proverbs that arose in the 20th and 21st centuries, organized alphabetically by key words and including information on date of origin, history and meaning.

In many parts of Appalachia, family ties run deep, constituting an important part of an individual’s sense of self. In some cases, when Appalachian learners seek new forms of knowledge, those family ties can be challenged by the accusation that they have gotten above their raisings, a charge that can have a lasting impact on family and community acceptance. Those who advocate literacy sometimes ignore an important fact — although empowering, newly acquired literacies can create identity conflicts for learners, especially Appalachian women. In Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment, Erica Abrams Locklear explores these literacy-initiated conflicts, analyzing how authors from the region portray them in their fiction and creative nonfiction. Abrams Locklear blends literacy studies with literary criticism to analyze the central female characters in the works of Harriette Simpson Arnow, Linda Scott DeRosier, Denise Giardina, and Lee Smith. She shows how these authors deftly overturn stereotypes of an illiterate Appalachia by creating highly literate characters, women who not only cherish the power of words but also push the boundaries of what literacy means. Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment includes in-depth interviews with Linda Scott DeRosier and Lee Smith, making this an insightful study of an important literary genre.

Mourning in the Mountains is a book designed to help people have a better understanding of death and dying. It offers hope for the hopeless and help for the helpless through sayings, poems, and personal narratives written by children, college students and adults who wish to share their experience in an effort to console others. Mourning in the Mountains allows the reader a reflective time and its sole purpose is to assure those who are dying or left behind, that death is a natural part of life. We need not run from it, nor embrace it prematurely, but we must accept it on life/death terms. This faith based book offers a reflective truth that is heard by the heart.

This book is a guide to Cormac McCarthy's canon from The Road to All the Pretty Horses, delving into the dominant themes in his work, his influences from Faulkner to Dante, and the current cultural debates his books have figured into.

A stingy man "won't drink branch water till there's a flood," and it is "a mighty triflin' sort o' man'd let either his dog or his woman starve." Some places are "so crowded you couldn't cuss a cat without gettin' fur in your mouth." For almost thirty years Horace Kephart collected sayings like these from his neighbors and friends in the area around Bryson City, North Carolina. Kephart, a librarian with an interest in languages and in the American Frontier, left his career and his family in midlife to settle in what was at the turn of the century the wilds of the Great Smokey Mountains. An assiduous collector and observer, he compiled twenty-six journals of notes on the folkways and speech of the Southern Appalachians at a time when the region was still largely isolated. Smokey Mountain Voices is a dictionary of Southern Appalachian speech based on Kephart's journals and publications; it is also a compendium of mountain lore. Harold Farwell and J. Karl Nicholas have compiled not only quaint and peculiar words, but jokes and comic exchanges. Many of the "ordinary" words that comprised an important part of the language of the mountaineers are preserved here thanks to Kephart's meticulous collecting. The editors have incorporated the original quotations with Kephart's definitions and explanations to create a rich source for the study of southern mountain speech. And within the echoes of these Smokey Mountain voices exists some of the joy and fullness of life that Horace Kephart shared and recorded. Smoky Mountain Voices will be of interest to dialectologists, historians of American English, students of regional literature, scholars of folk life, and laypersons interested in Southern Appalachia.

Group. Art. Text. Genre. Performance. Context. Tradition. Identity. No matter where we are--in academic institutions, in cultural agencies, at home, or in a casual conversation--these are words we use when we talk about creative expression in its cultural contexts. Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture is a thoughtful, interdisciplinary examination of the keywords that are integral to the formulation of ideas about the diversity of human creativity, presented as a set of essays by leading folklorists. Many of us use these eight words every day. We think with them. We teach with them. Much of contemporary scholarship rests on their meanings and implications. They form a significant part of a set of conversations extending through centuries of thought about creativity, meaning, beauty, local knowledge, values, and community. Their natural habitats range across scholarly disciplines from anthropology and folklore to literary and cultural studies and provide the framework for other fields of practice and performance as well. Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture is a much-needed study of keywords that are frequently used but not easily explained. Anchored by Burt Feintuch’s cogent introduction, the book features essays by Dorothy Noyes, Gerald L. Pocius, Jeff Todd Titon, Trudier Harris, Deborah A. Kapchan, Mary Hufford, Henry Glassie, and Roger D. Abrahams.

This book is a work of historical military fiction that describes the impact of ski troopers and their Mules on accelerating the end of World War II in Italy. That Great War was winding down in Europe but, in the Apennine Mountains of Italy, large quantities of Italian and Nazi soldiers were still well-entrenched. They were some of the best troops that either Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler could place in action against any Yankee advance. Each of them were very capable of doing considerable harm to a typical infantry division which had not been trained to fight under these harsh environmental conditions of thick snow banks, extremely low temperatures, severe freezing winds and rigorous ecological demands. This is to say that a typical infantry division and their artillery would have been seriously stalled by the deep snow drifts. As one advisor said, For the entrenched enemies, it would have been like shooting ducks in a pond. Fortunately, the US Army listened to the sage advice of their various consultants. The US Army formed their own Ski Trooper outfit to rid the mountain tops from their unwanted occupants, the soldiers of Italy and Germany. That outfit was named the Tenth Mountain Division but, as time passed on, the newsreels began to call them by a better name, they were known as Ruffners Raiders. Brigadier General David L. Ruffner was the Commanding General of the Tenth Mountain Division Artillery. Although The Tenth Division entered the combat zones rather late in the day, they still had one of the highest casualty rates for that War of all Wars. For the Mules that were involved, their loss of life was 94% since they provided such an easy target for the Snipers to kill.

Deborean A combination of Celtic tradition and Native American, most often Cherokee. Formed in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, the Carolinas and southwestern Virginia sometime between 1780 and 1800. This tradition originated as a result of marriages or family unions between the predominantly Celtic settlers and the Cherokee residents.