Enlightened Hillbillies: The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and

In this ground-breaking book Jeff Biggers makes a case that southern Appalachian mountain people and culture have been in the "vanguard" of just about every important development in American history, from self-government and independence to the abolition of slavery, music, journalism, literature, even industry and the labor and civil rights movements. Of course this flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that equates "Appalachia" with "backward." It also comes much closer to truth. Biggers sometimes stretches to make his case, and some of his examples of Appalachia in the vanguard are easier to accept than others. For example, although slavery was well-entrenched in much of southern Appalachia, a strong and extensive movement for abolition developed and persisted there a generation before "passing its leadership to the North," as Biggers puts it, placing Appalachia in the vanguard on at least this issue. On the other hand Biggers's citing, among his musical examples, of the quintessentially bland and mainstream Perry Como as an embodiment of Appalachian influence on American music is, for me at least, beyond belief. The Perry Como example shows another way in which Biggers sometimes stretches: Como, who grew up in the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania, left Appalachia early on and made his mark in the world outside in ways that, Biggers's assertion notwithstanding, seem only tenuously connected with Appalachia. Yes, countless Appalachians who've left their home landscape, typically out of economic necessity, have continued for the rest of their lives to think of Appalachia as home. But that doesn't by itself necessarily make whatever they do in their lives outside the region somehow characteristically or influentially Appalachian. In addition, Biggers's readers may from time to time wonder whether he is stretching in another way to make his case: Were all of the more-obscure individuals he chooses to highlight really significant influences either inside or outside the region, or oddities whose lives had little effect on broader currents of American life? One book can't, of course, cover all aspects of this huge topic in detail. Still, I wish Biggers had found room to pursue some parts of his story further. For example, a chapter on the Cherokee nation in its southern Appalachian homeland focuses primarily on Sequoyah's achievement of a written syllabary for the Cherokee language, and the extraordinary cultural renaissance this stimulated among Cherokees in the early 1800s, just prior to the heartbreak and dissolution of the nation's forced relocation west. Although this is very good as far as it goes, I wish it went further. Many present-day Appalachians whose families included Cherokee women long ago credit the autonomy accorded women in Cherokee culture with their own family's and community's acceptance of strong women ever since. In general, I wish Biggers had done more with tracing the influence of the past on the present; I hope he's not yet done with writing about Appalachia. The great virtue of this book, whether you buy Biggers's vanguard thesis or not, and what makes it well worth reading for anyone who cares about Appalachia, is the great range of information it gathers and presents, information needed for Appalachians and people everywhere to tell more truthful stories about the region, its people and its role in the wider world. Southern Appalachia has been outrageously misrepresented and misunderstood by the US mainstream. The ugly myth of Appalachia as the land of the ignorant, backward, homogenously white hillbilly, and the more romantic (but no less false) image of isolated, independent Appalachian backwoods farmers, throwbacks to simpler times persisting into the present, have for more than a century enabled powerful outside economic interests to do extensive and persistent damage to a place and people who deserve much better. The reality, as Biggers makes clear, is that southern Appalachia has been home to a diverse mix of ethnicities and cultures, from European-American subsistence farmers to a Cherokee nation that remained largely intact well into the 1800s to slave owners, slaves and former slaves. While this diversity was most apparent in early times, remnants of it have lingered and fused into a complex cultural amalgam that goes beyond the sum of its parts. One example that Biggers details of this fusion is the genesis of "country" music, combining elements of African-American blues and gospel as well as European folk and classical music in the mountain landscape and social setting to create its own distinctive and richly various genre. Everything Biggers writes is true, so far as I can tell. But much of it might equally well be taken as evidence that southern Appalachia, rather than having somehow led the way for the US mainstream, is instead a reservoir of older, alternative, non-mainstream cultural elements. It's as much an accident of neglect as a result of stubborn mountaineer persistence that such culture still exists at all: The mainstream US economy and the consumer culture it largely determines haven't deemed Appalachians important enough as consumers to fully commercialize all aspects of daily life in the region. So Appalachia, precisely because it hasn't been in the vanguard but has instead been passed by and left behind by the hyper-consuming mainstream, still retains elements of culture useful for making a transition to ways of living well with less consumption of resources–useful, in other words, in the urgent work of getting beyond the present-day endgame of the mainstream's use-it-up-and-move-on way of life. Appalachia is thus poised to be in the vanguard of this great transition–but only if we stop the enormous destruction of its natural and cultural resources that's going on today. "Will we still be able to write about mountaineers and hill folk," Biggers asks, "if we destroy the mountains and hills of Appalachia?" Mountaintop removal and other large-scale strip mining for coal have recently destroyed a million acres of forested mountain in southern Appalachia and buried more than a thousand miles of streams. This destruction has accelerated in the past five years; in the next few years, hundreds of thousands of additional acres are targeted for destruction. The Appalachian mountains, Biggers writes, "are being dismantled. And in the process, our... rich Appalachian and American heritage is at risk of being erased." Whatever you think of Appalachia as a vanguard in the past, or its potential for guiding us toward a better future, it's certainly in the vanguard today, as how we collectively choose to allow or stop this destruction "will determine whether our country's destiny will continue to be entangled in our natural and historical roots."