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 This
book explores connections and similarities between Scotland and Appalachia
from ancient times to the present, concentrating upon cultural revival
movements centered around vernacular language, literature and the folk
arts. The primary purpose of this book is to show how Scots and
Appalachians in the twentieth century have made creative use of vernacular
language, literature and folklore to express and define themselves in
their own terms. Hopefully this book will stimulate further discussions of
cultural revivals and identity politics on both sides of the Atlantic.
Richard Blaustein (B.A.,
Sociology and Anthropology, Brooklyn College, 1966. M.A., Folklore,
Indiana University, 1989, Ph.D., Folklore, Indiana University, 1975) is
Professor of Sociology and Anthropology and Senior Research Fellow of the
Center for Appalachian Studies and Services at East Tennessee State
University in Johnson City, Tennessee. In 1996, he was a visiting scholar
at the School of Scottish Studies and the International Social Sciences
Institute of the University of Edinburgh. In addition to his research on
Scotland and Appalachia, he is also an internationally known scholar and
performer of old-time fiddle and banjo music with numerous publications
and recordings to his credit who has performed in the United States,
Scotland and the Netherlands.
(excerpted from
introduction)
Prickly plants stubbornly clinging to the stony slopes of marginal
uplands, the thistle and the brier are living embodiments of tenacity in
the face of adversity.
The thistle is the ancient national symbol of Scotland, whose motto,
translated from the Latin, declares, "None Touch Me With Impunity." Down
through the centuries, the thistle has been an enduring symbol of the
tenacity of Scottish national identity.
Appalachian people
share that prickly mixture of pride and defensiveness embodied in the
Scottish thistle. Many present-day inhabitants of the Appalachian region
of the United States of America proudly claim Scottish ancestry and
strongly identify with Scotland to this day. For roughly a hundred years,
the Scottish Connection has been a central theme of American discourse
concerning Appalachia.
Unlike the
thistle, the brier is neither a national nor even a regional identity
symbol. Why then did the late Jim Wayne Miller (1936-1996), a leading
contemporary Southern Appalachian poet-scholar-cultural activist, choose
to call himself The Brier?
Deriving his
poetic pen name from "brierhopper," a contemptuous synonym for
"hillbilly," Miller converted a badge of prickly shame into an emblem of
blossoming pride, first stage in healing the fragmented, internally
divided identities of subordinated national or regional minorities like
Scots or Appalachians. Since the early eighties Miller's "Brier Sermon"
has become a primary reference point for Appalachian Studies, comparable
in its impact and status to Hugh MacDiarmid's celebrated poem "A Drunk Man
Looks At The Thistle" (1926) in the discourse of twentieth century
Scottish cultural nationalism. Though outwardly different in cadence and
accent, "The Brier Sermon" and "A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle" express
the same basic human desire for self-definition.
This book explores
connections and parallels between Scotland and Appalachia. References to
Scotland abound in the primary literature of Appalachian Studies, but
until I took on this task no one else had taken the time to systematically
review the foundation documents of this field to locate, identify and
comment upon these Scottish allusions. In Chapter One, I define Appalachia
in geological terms, discuss the impact of European colonization on the
aboriginal inhabitants of Southern Appalachia, and then proceed to glean
the writings of major American commentators on Appalachia published
between 1899 and 1936 for Scottish references. The American idea of
Appalachia is to a substantial extent grounded in comparisons to Scotland
derived from selective, romantic readings of Scottish history and
literature by such influential commentators as William Goodell Frost, John
Fox, Jr., Emma Bell Miles and Horace Kephart. Though largely the
descendents of Scottish lowlanders, the people of the Southern
Appalachians have been equated with Scottish highlanders in popular and
scholarly literature. The romantic haze of the Celtic Twilight continues
to confuse perceptions of Appalachian and Scottish highlanders to the
present day, despite the best efforts of revisionist regional historians,
beginning with John C. Campbell, himself the American-born son of a
Scottish highlander. Chapter One ends with a summary of a concise history
of Southern Appalachia with a strongly Scotch-Irish emphasis written by
Paul Doran, a Presbyterian minister from East Tennessee, published in
Mountain Life And Work in 1936, the same year Jim Wayne Miller was born.
Chapter Two continues
with a brief survey of the rise of the present-day Appalachian Studies
movement as it has developed in the wake of the War On Poverty initiated
during John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign. Kennedy's successor
Lyndon B. Johnson established the Appalachian Regional Commission in 1965,
including 406 counties in the Appalachian Highland sections of thirteen
states from southwestern New York down to northeastern Mississippi, taking
in all of West Virginia along with parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland,
Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and
Alabama. An uneasy and volatile aggregation of scholars and activists
drawn from diverse backgrounds, participants in the Appalachian Studies
movement have nonetheless found common cause in working to better the
lives of the people of a region long seen as out-of-step and out-of-line
with the American national mainstream.
To acquaint my readers
with the ideas of some of the leading scholar-activists in Appalachian
Studies since the early nineteen seventies concerning Appalachian
otherness, the assumption that Southern mountaineers are a people apart
from other Americans, I review a set of selected critical essays beginning
with founding figures like Helen Lewis, Cratis Williams and Wilma Dykeman
and culminating with a detailed survey of Rodger Cunningham's
controversial, award-winning book Apples On The Flood (1987). In his
ambitious psychohistory of the Scottish people and their Appalachian
descendents, Cunningham proposes that the internal division of the
contemporary Appalachian psyche can be traced back to waves of invaders
subordinating native inhabitants of the Western fringe of Atlantic Europe,
culminating in the imposition of English upon Gaels in the lowlands of
Scotland in the fourteenth century. While some scholars might argue with
Cunningham's chronology, the external imposition of official language and
the suppression of native speech ways in culturally depriving schools has
undeniably been part of the common experience of Scottish and Appalachian
schoolchildren within living memory. Much of the creative activity in
Scotland and Appalachia today can be interpreted as cultural therapy
promoting "healing of the divided self," through reviving and reinventing
indigenous language and literature along with various genres of folk and
traditional song, music, and dance.
Chapter Three was
written when I was reconsidering my theoretical assumptions concerning
cultural revitalization and seeking to expand beyond my primary concern
with revivals of folk and traditional music, which I had investigated in
my 1975 doctoral dissertation on the rise of the Old Time Fiddlers
Association Movement in the United States.
In 1994, I visited and
interviewed my old friend Flora MacDonald Gammon of Waynesville, North
Carolina, whose family played a key role in initiating the Grandfather
Mountain Highland Games, now one of the largest Scottish heritage
gatherings in North America. Chapter Four presents her life-long
involvement with Scottish heritage activities and Appalachian folk
revivalism.
About the same time, I
had read Edinburgh University sociologist David McCrone's illuminating
book Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of A Stateless Nation (1992)
and began to correspond with him via e-mail in 1994. Chapter Five
discusses McCrone's book and its implications for understanding identity
politics in Appalachia, including a comparison of David McCrone's critique
of American sociologist Michael Hechter's application of Immanuel
Wallerstein's world systems theory in his book The Celtic Fringe (1975)
with Appalachian/Scottish-American sociologist Roberta McKenzie's
penetrating analysis of the intellectual history of the concepts of world
systems theory and internal colonialism in the discourse of Appalachian
Studies since the early 1970s.
When I visited
face-to-face with David McCrone in Edinburgh for the first time in 1995, I
had to acknowledge that the Scottish folk revival, though tremendously
interesting to me, was only one component of a wider cultural and
political movement paralleling the rise of the Appalachian Studies
movement in the United States. In 1996, I had the opportunity to talk at
length with some of Scotland's leading scholars, artists and activists
concerning cultural revivals and identity politics.
Chapter Six compares
Jim Wayne Miller's Brier Sermon with Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks
At The Thistle. Chapter Seven presents the late Hamish Henderson's
reflections upon the folk revival and its interconnections with poetry and
other facets of contemporary Scottish cultural nationalism. Chapter Eight
begins with a critique of Ian McKay's deconstruction of the twentieth
century folk revival in Nova Scotia in his book The Quest of The Folk,
strongly influenced by Appalachian cultural critic David Whisnant's All
Things Native And Fine (1983) and ends by identifying key points of
convergence in the careers of cultural leaders in Scotland and Appalachia.
Chapter Nine documents
that many leading figures in Appalachian Studies, like their counterparts
in Scottish cultural nationalist circles, have sought to reclaim
vernacular speech ways suppressed by colonialistic school teachers intent
upon imposing elite linguistic standards.
Chapter Ten is an
edited transcription of a conversation with Joy Hendry, editor and
publisher of a major Scottish literary magazine. Her lucid observations
concerning poetry as a paradigm for all genres of creative self-expression
highlight the central concern of this book: how peripheral people
including Scots and Appalachians seek to recover their native voices as
they struggle to define themselves in their own terms. This book concludes
with reflections on the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament on the
first of July 1999 and a call for expanding trans-Atlantic dialogue
concerning connections and parallels between Scotland and Appalachia.
North American readers can
order this book online from
www.mcfarlandpub.com.
In Europe, North Africa and Middle East, contact
www.eurospan.co.uk.
In Australia and New Zealand, order from
www.dadirect.com.au,
and in India ,
www.vivagroupindia.net.
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