KENTUCKY CULTURE:  Appalachia

We have been looking at a very broad subject, Kentucky culture.  Now, we are going to “narrow” a bit to our own region:  Appalachia.

Eastern Kentucky, the heart of Central Appalachia, was unique in many ways, as America’s first frontier.  The British had sought to keep any English colonists from going west of the Appalachian Mountain region in the Proclamation of 1763, which would have excluded settlement of Kentucky.  But pioneers and frontiersmen traversed the mountains anyway, and began exploring what would come to be known as Kentucky.

The frontiersmen who blazed the trails, and the pioneers who followed to settle the region, brought their language, music, and culture from the land of their ancestors – mostly England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Isolated from much of the rest of the nation by the mountains, traditional culture in Appalachia was preserved and passed on, affecting cultural expression and even language.  

Mountain people had to learn to survive with what was available, making them a self-reliant and also very independent people.  A strong oral tradition – which included stories, songs, poems, ballads, and folk-tales – developed.  Many of those older cultural expressions survive to the present day, including things like traditional music, storytelling, clogging, and quilting. 

Clogging is a unique dance style, instantly recognized as “Appalachian,” is actually a blend of dances, harmonizing things learned from Native American, African American, English, Irish, and even German culture.  The Cherokee of central Appalachia had a “stomp” kind of dance, and both the English and Irish had clog- and step-dancing.  Tunes yet known today, like “Cotton-eyed Joe” and “Shady Grove,” are actually ancient. 

Story-telling in Appalachia derived from European fairy tales, like “Jack and the beanstalk.”  Vocal expressions and strong gestures often accompanied story-telling, and still do.   So-called “Jack Tales” (because the hero’s name was invariably “Jack”) were passed from generation to generation. 

Appalachia had a long tradition of what would be described as “traditional” or “folk” music, and “hillbilly bands” originating from Appalachia became quite popular beyond the region.  In the 1930’s, a performer named Bill Monroe, who had become a hit at the Grand Old Opry in Nashville, helped popularize what had previously been called simply “hillbilly” music.  It was a country music with a particularly “hard” tone to it.  What Monroe was developing involved musical traditions he had learned as a boy growing up in Kentucky, which included Scotch-Irish and African American influences. 

Because Monroe and his band were originally from Kentucky, he called his group “Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys,” and the music, through Monroe’s influence, came to be known simply as “Bluegrass.”  Other Appalachian people made their own mark on Bluegrass music in the late 1940’s through the 1960’s, including the Stanley Brothers, Jimmy Martin, Jim and Jesse McReynolds, and the Osborne Brothers.   Performers continue to both evoke the traditions of the past as well as build upon them in the continuing evolution of Appalachian music.