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.
J. Edgar Hoover very famously denied the existence of organized crime up until the Appalachian Meeting, I think, in 1957. It was interesting to me that he clearly had to know that there was such a thing as organized crime...
Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.
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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.
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...
American Quotes
The inspiration for our vocal harmonies was sort of Appalachian. It's sort of at weird intervals, and it almost has an Appalachian kind of feel to it. The harmonies were really spontaneous. And the way we jammed, we would just...
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...
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...
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.
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...
Beautiful Quotes
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...
I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.
If you go out on the Appalachian Trail, you have to bring so much more equipment - a tent, sleeping bag - but if you go hiking in England, or Europe, generally, towns and villages are near enough together at...
I think, being from east Tennessee, you're kinda born with a little lonesome in your soul, in your blood. You know you've got that Appalachian soul.
