Appalachian Folk-metaphysics and the Power of Choice in Wiley Cash’s The Last Ballad

Appalachia has often been eager to accept the perspectives of outsiders when it comes to characterizing who we are as a people within a region. These outside perspectives, masquerading as either science or folk-history, severely complicate the already knotty concept of Appalachian identity and culture. In order to untangle this complex rhetorical web, I propose a return to an Appalachian Aesthetics rooted in our folk-metaphysics as illustrated in Wiley Cash’s novel The Last Ballad. This paper explores the role nostalgia has in redefining tradition and fatalism by explicating Cash’s aesthetics as a particular set of problem solving techniques, inherent in Appalachian folklore and lifeways, providing a strategy for living a meaningful life in the face of uncertainty, in-justice, and failure. Through an exploration of how time, ethical planning, and action create art and meaning, individual choice, as informed by these texts, replaces passive fatalism as the means by which we construct and express who we are as individuals and a region. By making readers aware of the unique qualities and contexts that go into the creation and expression of Appalachian literature, those of us in the region will see ourselves in this particular manifestation of folk-literature and not in the mass media narratives that reduce us to either clowns or monsters. For those not from the region, they, too, will discover Appalachia and Appalachians in this folk-literature where we express our roots and our place, in our art, as an essential fact of our existence

What is Wyrd about Appalachian Fatalism?: Re-thinking Freedom and Action in Hillbilly Folk-Metaphysics

The mass media often characterizes Appalachian folk-metaphysics as backward, superstitious, and fatalistic. Likewise, the “hillbilly” is presented as a degenerate whose blind adherence to tradition has led him/her to pessimistic quietism. This rhetoric utilizes shame inducing caricatures, like those found in Deliverance and Wrong Turn, to argue for the discarding of outdated and regressive values so the hillbilly may be reformed and brought back into the fold of civilized society. However, as Rodger Cunningham points out, “this kind of language from the usual suspects should clue us in to the fact that [Appalachian folk-metaphysics] is actually something quite different and valuable.” Using Jean Ritchie’s “Cool of the Day” as an organizing, hermeneutic key, this paper seeks to reconsider the foundational Appalachian characteristics of fatalism, tradition, and individualism in the context of the unique cosmovision expressed in the songs, folk narratives, and family stories that were (and still are) the essence of cultural and personal existential vitality. From the traditional Jack Tales to Silas House’s A Parchment of Leaves, the stories we tell to and about ourselves contain encoded, epistemic structures that provide organizing principles for meaningful action. Ultimately, I argue that the solutions to the unique problems of Appalachia are found not in the rejection of traditional Appalachian folk values, but in a return to the essential lessons regarding choice and freedom found in mountain narratives. Rather than eulogize the hillbilly as JD Vance suggests, I will stress Maurice Manning’s call to get “more hillbilly as [we] go.

These Stories Sustain Me: Traditional Narratives and the Affirmation of Folk Metaphysics

Growing up in South East Appalachia Ohio, I heard stories about Daniel Boone from my father, Logan the Orator from my high school wrestling coach/history teacher, and listened to my Grandma sing “The Ballad of John Henry.” These “folktales,” shared by my elders, taught me the foundational meaning of place, self, and virtue—what Charles Upton calls “folk metaphysics.” Later, in college, I was confronted with mass media counter narratives depicting my reality as, paradoxically, both clownish and dangerous, causing me to question my identity in a world beyond the home place. Drawing on both personal experience and my ten years working with traditional Navajo Story Tellers, I explore the role folklore and mass media counter narratives have in constructing Appalachian identity. Specifically, I draw a distinction between folklore’s concern with developing and maintain heritage and culture by affirming traditional values of family and place and mass media’s focus on re-configuring negative stereotypes as cultural resistance. These counter narratives create a negative view of Appalachian culture leading to a rejection of best selves, promising liberation from shame and guilt in a system of anonymous, social marginalization. Part textual and social criticism and part self-ethnography, this paper utilizes social-epistemic rhetorical analysis and Erich Fromme’s psychological perspective on disobedience and submission to discuss the role folktales and folktellers have in reclaiming the vitality of our stories to validate the diversity of cultural and personal “identity work” from mass media’s standardization of narratives produced for consumption by caricatured demographics