Perceptions of Home Exhibit Audio

Included in the Perceptions of Home exhibit is an audio accompaniment with excerpts from selected interviews. The voices heard on this audio accompaniment are Clyde Brummett, Percy Marshall, Virgil Preston, Marlon Wightman, Jerry Sebastian, Katie Laur, Ernie Mynatt, Estel Sizemore, Becky Sebastian, Charlene Dalton, Taylor Farley, Jr., Patty Cody, Richard Hague, Judy Turner, Omope Carter Daboiku, Harriet Marsh Page, Bill Herald, and Jerald Robertson. The music on the soundtrack was performed by Taylor Farley, Jr., Dave Pinson, and Dan Cade.

Perceptions of Home: The Urban Appalachian Spirit

(Transcript of Audio Component)

Clyde Brummett: Well, I was born in Whitley County, Kentucky. I was born in the home where I lived, there in my mother’s home. It was July 26, 1944. I’m the baby of 11 children.

Percy Marshall: I was born at 8512 Blanche, Tennessee. Born there, and in front of the church what my grandfather was the founder of, 1904.

Virgil Preston: Yeah. I was born in 1909, in the coal mining camp of the Thealka in Johnson County, Kentucky.

Marlon Wightman: Cumberland County, Tennessee, near a small town called Pleasant Hill; well, halfway between Pleasant Hill and Mayland, Tennessee.

Jerry Sebastian: I was born September the 5th, 1937, at Canoe in Breathitt County, which is about a mile up the Middle Fork River from where she was born. I was one of 12 children. My mother and dad raised 12 children. I’m the seventh child, up to 12. I stayed in Breathitt; I graduated from Breathitt High at 16, after three and a half years. I left home when I was 16 in December of ‘53.

Katie Laur: Well, it’s about 60 miles southwest of Nashville. One of the reasons I never went to Nashville like so many other bluegrass acts, was because I always thought it would be a step backwards. I was glad to get out of Tennessee, but, you know, you ask, where’s home? I can’t remember a year in my life that I haven’t said, I’m going home for the holidays or going home, you know, whenever I was going home. Why do you always say going home? I’ve lived here since 1967 and this is very much my home. I’ve lived here longer than I ever lived anywhere else. So, this is really technically home, but yet I always say I’m going home.

Musical Interlude

Don Corathers: The Urban Appalachian Council presents Perceptions of Home: The Urban Appalachian Spirit. Interviews by Don Corathers, photographs by Malcolm J. Wilson.

Ernie Mynatt: In the county I grew up in, I had holes in my britches and it’d be patched by my grandmother. And then the patches would be patched, you know, and ragged as hell. Lived in the coal town and my dad was making do with chalk eye, you know, for $2 a day. And he had five kids, there was seven in the family. And you can imagine where $2 would go even back then with seven in the family, and how he bought shoes for me and all that stuff, but he did. I spent 10 years telling the people how people left their home in Llewellyn, Kentucky or in High Speck, Kentucky, or some of the coal towns there and came to Cincinnati, and how they came and what, what caused them to when they did.

Estel Sizemore: Well, my brothers and sisters, they, as they growed up, they would leave, you know, just kind of like a bird in a nest. When they get so old, they got to go. And you kind of got tired of that kind of life. You thought there was something else better, but really there wasn’t nothing no better.

Becky Sebastian: I remember leaving my grandfather’s. When we left, one of my uncles took us down to make the bus and we rode a mule to the mouth of Buck. And then we took the bus, the Black Brothers bus to Jackson that came out of Richmond. And we spent the night at my aunt’s and got up the next morning and got on the train coming to Newport. And my first impression, yeah, that’s the first time I’ve – I’m sure it was the first time I’ve ever even seen the train.

Marlon Wightman: We traveled, I came here, my sister and her husband owned a 1937 Ford Automobile. And we traveled all day long coming up from Tennessee. We didn’t have any interstates then, so we came up Route 25, I believe it was. And we got here just after the sun had set, and I have heard this related from lots of people, we came around of Dixie Highway, around Covington Hill, and I saw the lights of the city shining on the river, and I thought that was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life, was Cincinnati and all its lights.

Here, it’s just…I had never seen anything like this before, and that was my impression of Cincinnati. It was soon dampened, though, when we got to the apartment and I saw it. It was kind of a dingy little place that didn’t give anyone a real good impression, but I was so tired and so exhausted that I didn’t have a bit of trouble going to sleep that night. I slept like a baby.

Musical Interlude

Marlon Wightman: And the next day when I awoke, my sister and her husband had already gotten up and gone to work. This would be Monday morning. And I could hear noises. It was the sounds that I could hear. Some that I could detect, and others, I couldn’t detect what they were. There was the Model Laundry was located not far from 13th Street where they lived, I think, just about a block away. And there were noises coming, and it was coming to life. There was a peddler peddling ice up the back alley on the side, and he was hollering out his ice sales. And, of course, the automobile sounds, the horns. The streetcars were clanging up and down Vine Street. That was just right there close. And it was a big giant awakening to me, and that was my impression. It didn’t scare me. It was, it was more exciting than anything.

Charlene Ledbetter Dalton: When you come from the country, and you come down here, you know, you live in buildings, you live with rats, you know, I mean, at least that’s our situation, okay? You’re known as poverty. Even though you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re poor, but you are. You’re in the lowest neighborhoods. You have to dress different. You have to… you know, people made fun of my talk a lot. Okay. That was one of the bad things. It was altogether different living. You know, people didn’t poke fun at you and stuff like that. You know what I’m saying?

But here they did.

Taylor Farley, Jr.: The people when they first came up here from down in the country were like any other ethnic group, they stuck together. They didn’t let outsiders in. They didn’t want in because they, they were afraid they were going to get hurt or they were going to get took, if nothing else. Or they were going to be made fun of or something like that. So, it was a form of self-preservation, and it’s still there ingrained in every type of ethnic group, I guess you’d say, because I’m not saying that a person that comes from the mountains shouldn’t try to adapt to what’s going on out there. But they should never forget where they came from.

Clyde Brummett: It’s always funny. I might should spend more time on my accent trying to correct it, but I just didn’t. But it was funny. Every time, well, where are you from, you know, that’s the first thing that comes out of their mouth. I’m all right until I open my mouth, you know. But when I open my mouth, people went, well, where are you from, you know?

Don Corathers: Why would you want to change?

Clyde Brummett: I don’t want to change. That’s the reason I haven’t. That’s the reason I haven’t. I’m proud of my heritage. I’m proud of who I am. The greatest thing that I have is what was given to me as, as a young person. The community, the people that I lived in, you know, it’s just terrific. And I, I wish that things were the same now as it was then for the people because people looked after one another, you know. And, and it was just different. I mean, the community, the people in the community looked after me as much as my family did.

Katie Laur: It was very scary to live in that big cold, cold place. And they did call us a lot of names. We didn’t go into a ghetto kind of environment like a lot of Appalachian people did. We, our family, was what psychologists have called over-enmeshed. We didn’t have friends outside the family. We spent weekends in one another’s. We’d fix… in those days, people had basements in Detroit and they’d fix them up and we would have a piano and we’d sing. I feel quite sure that music was our salvation, that saved us from kind of going down in the drain, music and storytelling. Because no matter how bad things got, you could sing and once you sing you always feel better.

Clyde Brummett: I wanted to be a teacher, but the politics involving education at that time and still is, in the mountains, although my sister, she taught there and retired. But, there’s a lot of politics, and I just didn’t like politics. The greatest thing about Kentucky is its people and its scenery. The worst thing about it is its politics. And so, I just couldn’t get it. My principal told me, you know, I did some substitute teaching for him, and, he said, Clyde, he said, you need to go north. He said, there’s, you know, you just need to go north. He told me, he said, Clyde, he said, there’s a lot of our people up north. And he said, they’re having hard time. He said, I’ve been there. And he said, you know, you can do just as much good up there as you can here.

Estel Sizemore: I always I did want to learn how to read. And I knew I had something missing in my life. It was mostly because we was poor. Because I had a good teacher, Ms. Roberts in Kentucky, and she was a swell lady, you know. And back then, we couldn’t afford to eat in a lunch rooms, so we’d pack our lunch. And I used to take cornbread and soup beans and taters in my lunch for school. And we had a lunchroom and it was ten cents, but I couldn’t, I don’t have ten cents. So, she would give me a ticket for my lunch, you know. And the days I didn’t have nothing to bring, and then she’d give me a ticket. She was a great lady.

Musical Interlude

Patty Cody: There probably was never a time or a thought that I would stay in Hazard because people didn’t do that. You went to college or I was expected to go to college, and then look for a job. And what did you do in, in Hazard at that time? You were part of the coal mines or… you know?

Richard Hague: Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of Painters, one of the, you know, most gorgeous landscape schools in all of American painting, spent his most impressionable time as a boy sketching the landscape in Steubenville, his family immigrated from England. On the one hand, we have this fabulous beauty, this natural landscape of hills and hollers and rivers and, and just fabulous. And then we’ve got this industrial place that, when I’d take people home who lived in places like Richmond, Indiana or like that from college, they would be astonished. We’d enter the Ohio Valley and it’s one mill and one light at night. They’d all say, where are we? This is not like where I come from.

Judy Turner: The whole time that I was growing up the only thing… my parents, they never pushed me and Patty to be anything or to do anything, except they always said, when you grow up, we don’t want you to work in the bag factory. Whatever you do, don’t make paper bags.

Omope Carter Daboiku: Things from home would be brought back to me, and I was recognizing this, the importance of it. Growing up, you know, folks in Ohio put great distance between themselves and the folks across the river. They were Appalachia. We wasn’t, we was in the north. It’s the southern hillbillies. We’re, I mean, we’re living in town. We wear shoes. We have running water and flush toilets. We are not they. And after I got in the city and had my children I began to realize what was really important to me. You can see what’s important to me. Furniture is not important to me. The way a house looks is not important to me. The fact the roof don’t leak is what’s important to me. What’s important to me? Stuff like this little thing right here. This little…, Sola made this, this year at the center and she probably will be on the Christmas tree when she’s sixteen. That’s important to me.

Patty Cody: Well, it’s so good to know other people from the area because I think for a long time, I didn’t. Most of my friends were from…and that was fine…from Louisville or from other places. But to meet people here, and share some of the stuff, to hear the different stories. And, you know, even though there’s a lot of us from that area, we’re very different, and our backgrounds are very different. But, yeah, I want that connectedness.

Harriet Marsh Page: There are people from West Virginia everywhere. And I just always tell people, they have a different spirit and a different heart. And I mean that I don’t think they…I’m not saying that there’s no injustice or anything, but I don’t think they judge, I think they, they’re quicker to judge an individual than they are to put you in a class of people and have you carry the burden of whatever is going on, you know.

Katie Laur: Some friends of mine had told me that there was this place I ought to go, and was Aunt Maudie’s, and it was in kind of a bad part of town, but, that a lot of people will go… it was beginning to be a little bit hip. And I went down there and the door opened, and that was, I think, the most electrified feeling I have ever… I felt like I lit up like a Christmas tree. It felt like every part of my body smiled. I just stood there stark still. You cannot imagine what effect something like bluegrass can have. Maybe it felt like coming home. Whatever it was, the effect it had on me was enormous, just instantly. And that was Junior McIntyre and Jim McCall, and they were singing Salty Dog Blues, which I had heard Flatt and Scruggs do at home, you know, but here I was completely rootless, divorced, cast out on the world, nothing to do, didn’t know what I was going to do next. And the impact it had on me was so great that I just moved in there. You know, I kept my apartment, but I just stayed at Aunt Maudie’s all the time after that.

Musical Interlude

Patty Cody: My parents are still living, and I talked to somebody from there three, maybe four times a week. And, of course, I’m still very close to my family. And we visit all the time, every time we get a chance to get away from here. And also try to get them to come to us, even though we spend more time there just because it’s more fun. And my mother cooks better.

Charlene Ledbetter Dalton: It’s peaceful. It gives you… you belong here. You know, the city is just a hustle bustle. You know, people down there, if you ride by their place and you don’t wave, they’re insulted. You know, that’s where it really gets me. I mean, you got to stop and say howdy to them. It’s simple and plain. You know, here in the city, if you say hi to somebody, they think you’re trying to mug them or something. You know what I’m saying?

Richard Hague: I feel weird that I haven’t lived there for so long, because I still live there in my thoughts and imagination to great extent. Although, having lived there had prepared me to live anywhere. I mean, it taught me about neighborhoods, taught me about putting down roots, taught me about that kind of stuff.

Patty Cody: There is a certain feeling when we go back. There’s nothing that is nicer than sitting on my mom’s couch. And, when we visit there, it’s social. There’s family coming in and out and calling on the phone every second. You know, there’s cooking and kids and talk and people and all that all the time. And certainly, that’s the, what I always say is home, but, of course, it isn’t.

You know, nor would I want to move back there to my mother’s house, you know. And I mean, she wouldn’t like that either, you know?

Taylor Farley, Jr.: There’s times right now… like I said, my dad was very rudimentary. He didn’t know a lot of stuff on a banjo, but there was… it was all soul to me, it’s all feeling. And right now, if I want to do something to have fun, if I want to pick up the banjo to play, I mean, on a stage, that’s one thing. But if I’m sitting around the house and want to fun, I don’t even use picks. I just sit around and just do that simple old claw hammer stuff like he used to do. It just brings back the memories of my dad and my grandpa. And that was some of the best times in my life. It really was. We had a blast, but I see what they went through, because I’ll tell you something, I’ve got to play on stage. I’ve opened up shows for Earl Scruggs. I’ve played with Charlie Daniels. I’ve played some of the biggest shows that you could ever name. But there’ll never be a feeling like the first time that young’un and comes in and says, hey, dad, this is something you play and picks up the banjo, so, yeah, it’s passed on. And, yeah, I can, every time I sit and watch him and I see the old man or my grandpa all the time because right now he’s just, a lot of times he’s hitting licks that they did and he don’t even know it. So, it’s just weird where it comes from. Something inside of you, I guess.

Musical Interlude

Bill Herald: It’s something that when the spring of the year comes, you want to go back because, I don’t know, to me, there’s no place any more beautiful than the mountains in the summer and or in the spring and in the fall. And it’s just, it’s something that just inside of me that I’d like to go back and, if it’s just to go back for a day.

Don Corathers: It’s almost like a physical need in there?

Bill Herald: It is.

Don Corathers: What is the nourishment that you get out of that?

Bill Herald: I don’t know. I guess it’s just that you think of when you grew up, and all the people that you knew and the way of life. It’s like you want to go back, but it’s not there, you know.

Charlene Ledbetter Dalton: As they’re growing up, you know, you romp and you tromp and you enjoy everything, but as you get older, there’s not a whole lot to do. Okay? So, you kindly want to spread your wings and see what this big city is about, and then somehow when you get up here, you get stuck in it, and then it’s hard to get back. You know what I’m saying? And I think that most Kentucky people want to go back because they got something nobody else got.

Richard Hague: The urban Appalachian culture, no, I don’t think that that’s rooted me. I think it’s just been a kind natural development of always living in the neighborhoods of the students that I teach… and always kind of living on this side of town. I still haven’t lived anywhere more than six or seven miles from the Ohio River, so I guess, all of that’s part of it. There are still problems being Appalachian in the city or being whatever in the city, that are modern versions of what it must have been like in the 40s, 30s, 20s in Steubenville, you know, where there was a lot of immigration and a lot of change and a lot of demographic kind of change, so… But, no, it’s not the Appalachian culture, the urban Appalachian culture as such that’s made me feel rooted. It’s just kind of a habit of rooting, I guess. Yeah, kind of a nesting instinct or something. I’ve got to feel at home, and that doesn’t happen passively, you see. Pursue it. I think having kids… living in a neighborhood, having a garden, you know, those kinds of things connect you to a place.

Estel Sizemore: Yeah. I would have probably been better off to stay there because down in education, I’d have probably got along better there. Without an education, of course, … I probably might have got my education anyway, but I would have got along probably better there than I would here because people are different there. It’s hard here without an education, and it’s hard to live in a city. It’s… it’s hard.

Jerry Sebastian: This is home to me, and I’m very comfortable here with that as I don’t have that longing, that pull that I’ve got to go back there to live as soon as I can, as soon as I’ve made it to where I don’t have to, you know, make a living back there. And, some people do have that. That’s been their goal all along, as soon as they can get to where they can go back there and live comfortably, they want… I don’t ever want to do that. This isn’t for me. But I don’t ever want to lose that connection that I have there either.

Harriet Marsh Page: I still consider home Logan. I have no family there and actually, as time goes, probably no friends. You know, there’s there was a time I’d say I’d go home and I wouldn’t worry about where I’d stay. Now I worry about where I’d stay and probably stay in a motel or hotel somewhere and…because the older people are dying off. But every time I have gone back home in the last 10 years, which hasn’t been often, I’ve been surprised about the return to home of people that I went to school with.

Jerald Robertson: And I looked at it and I thought, you know, where have been happiest in your life? And I said, right here. And to me, it seemed to make sense if that’s where you’ve been happiest. Why not go back?

Percy Marshall: I think of home… home is… Tennessee is my home. Yeah. I think of that still being my home. But when you get a job at another place, you go there. Maybe make a little living, buy a home, a house or something like that. But if I had to choose a place to go, I could go back down home. Oh, yeah. I could live comfortable down there. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Virgil Preston: I’ll always think of my home being in Appalachia, Kentucky, Appalachia. That’s where I was born and reared. I never got out of there until I was about, what? 24, 25… 1941. So, and I still go back every year.

Omope Carter Daboiku: Well, let me tell you what I finally have figured out because I’ve gone through the where’s home. And I figured where’s home is where you want to be buried. And I want to be buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Ironton, Ohio.

Harriet Marsh Page: Daddy loved West Virginia. You would have thought he was born and raised there. He loved West Virginia. And when he would get to that delirium state, he would see West Virginia, and he’d talk West Virginia, he loved those hills. He, really… I mean, nobody could love it and not been born there any more than he. And I thought it was, it’s important for me, for the people that I grew up around and all to be at that funeral. So, we took him home and we had the funeral there, and then I buried him in Georgia.

Musical Interlude

Richard Hague: This is called “Directions Back.”

First, wake from your bitter sleep

full of subway and airplane dreams,

hot noise and strain of yearly leavings,

drunken careerings and jobs.

Lie still, for a change, there

where your head fits its pillow

like a stone, its little slope of field.

Recollect yourself, the outskirts

of your body, the far townships

of your ankles and feet

beneath the quilt like a landscape itself,

your hands across your chest

as if holding tenderly your own heart

like a rabbit flushed from its nest.

Recollect the sandstone counties

of your mind,

the dwellings your thoughts have built

on their high oak ridges and their every hollow.

Recollect their inhabitants,

old friends like the words

you always return to: stone,

dark, sycamore, creek.

At home again in your flesh,

as words are at home in their tongues,

or lives at home in their days,

gather yourself in to the notion

of rising, and rise,

cross the room,

look out the window

to where your past waits to begin.

Open your borders,

unfolding them like hands

extended in welcome

toward the procession of your selves

and their family-common names:

oak, sandstone,

water, slopes and light.

Musical Interlude

Don Corathers: Perceptions of Home: The Urban Appalachian Spirit was produced by the Urban Appalachian Council of Cincinnati with major funding support from the Kentucky Humanities Council, The Ohio Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ohio Arts Council, the Ohio Appalachian Arts Initiative, the Ruth Mott Fund, Synergy, Louise Spiegel, and Christ Church Cathedral. The photographs in the exhibit are by Malcolm J Wilson. The interviews were conducted by Don Corathers.

The voices heard on this audio accompaniment to the exhibit are Clyde Brummett, Percy Marshall, Virgil Preston, Marlon Wightman, Jerry Sebastian, Katie Laur, Ernie Mynatt, Estel Sizemore, Becky Sebastian, Charlene Dalton, Taylor Farley, Jr., Patty Cody, Richard Hague, Judy Turner, Omope Carter Daboiku, Harriet Marsh Page, Bill Herald, and Jerald Robertson. The music on the soundtrack was performed by Taylor Farley, Jr., Dave Pinson, and Dan Cade. Richard Hague’s poem “Directions Back” is used by permission. The soundtrack was produced by Don Corathers and Jay Noelle. The audio engineers were Chris Fee and Jeff Monroe.