Search - The Appalachians on DVD

Deep In The Hills And Hollow

Alfred Johnson | boston, ma | 10/23/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I have spend no little time over the past several months putting roots music, the historical roots of mountain music in the hills and hollows of the Appalachians, especially Kentucky and my own personal connection with the place as a son of a coal mining son of the region together. This film documentary takes two of those strands, roots music and the history of the region and tries to explain the values behind the music and behind the pioneer spirit that drove some of our forbears to those lonely hill and hollows to eke out a an existence and create a cultural gradient that is not always understandable to those of us not immersed in that milieu. Except those virtues of hard work, hard religion, hard times and hard liquor are not all that far from the mainstream experiences, at least of earlier generations. In a sense this film is a tribute to a vanishing breed, a breed the mined the coal in the eastern mines, and farmed those hard rock acres. I like to think that some of those virtues and, of course, the music would not die.

Along the way this documentary traces the roots of the original Northern European settlers as they fled, or were pushed , from the East Coast and sought the new virgin lands of the then `west' in the 17th and 18th centuries. Their uneasy relationship, finally untenable, with the various indigenous Native American tribes in the 19th century. The film also points out the gathering storm over the slavery issue that would literally become the "brothers' war" in much of the region in the mid-19th century civil war. In the post- Civil War period the outlines of a distinctive Appalachian cultural gradient became recognizable through an exploitation of the natural resources of the area generated by the needs of the emerging industrial age, especially mining of the abundant coal fields. The struggle between labor and capital takes center place as the driving force from then until the near present. This includes the titanic struggles for mine workers union recognition, the demise of labor intensive coal mining and the rise of mass high tech mining that has ravished the land.


But, mainly this film is an exposition on the music. Without straining credulity "mountain music" is the music of the simple folk of Appalachia, those who worked hard in the coal mines, on the hard scrabble farms and in the isolated mills of the region. This was their Saturday night entertainment and with the advent of radio was a unifying cultural experience. The songs "speak" of hard and lonely lives, the beauty of the then pristine countryside, the usual vagaries of love and lost and the mysterious ways of a very personal, if arbitrary, god. Throw in a few upbeat tunes reflecting the love of "corn" liquor, women and the sometimes funny side of coping with life's trials and tribulations and you have the mountain version of the folk experience. Sound familiar? Sure it does, except, it is done with simple guitar, a blazing fiddle and, hopefully, a full-bodied mandolin.
"