It's Time to Come Clean: New Yorkers Are Plugged in to Our Country's Dirtiest Source of Power

By Jeff Biggers, Indypendent. Posted May 28, 2009.

Malcolm Gladwell, like all New Yorkers, needs to see this play in the Village to glean another vision of Appalachia's coal wars.

When I read Gladwell's "Outliers" recently, my mind drifted back to an evening at the Village Gate jazz club in 1961, when a striking contralto took the stage. All the hep cats of jazz were there; front row was probably lined with those Carolinian hilljacks like John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn. The Stray actually knew the diva; had exchanged stories of the backwoods life in the Blue Ridge, and those revivals straight out of Africa.

When Nina Simone finally sat down at the piano, she dazzled the crowd with her jazz ballads, pop tunes, Broadway musicals, and those haunting piano riffs that tailed off with a Bach motif. Then, she turned to the audience and announced she was going to play a little folk song -- "probably something you'd never heard before"-- that she had learned in the Appalachian woods of western North Carolina. She performed, "House of the Rising Sun." Before long, Bob Dylan and the Animals would be covering her famous recording.

Simone, the high priestress of soul, didn't know that the classic English ballad had actually been recorded by another Appalachian in the 1940s, a coal miner in eastern Kentucky.

Appalachian literary critic Jim Wayne Miller liked to recount an old tale about flatboaters who trundled down the Tennessee River, passing house after house at night with a "great fire burning, people dancing, always to the same fiddle tune." The boaters didn't realize they were caught in the "Boiling Pot" eddy, going in circles around the same house, unaware of the greater wonders in the Appalachian mountains.

For Gladwell, the eastern Kentucky coalfields are the poster children of environmental neglect, victims destined to fail, trapped in a tragic Scot-Irish destiny of war.

In the 1930s, as coal goons busted into her home and disturbed the peace in her near famine environment in Harlan County, threatening the life of her husband, a union organizer, Florence Reece simply tore a sheet from her calendar on the wall, hummed a Baptist tune, and wrote down the same words that echoed in Chicago in May, as strikers demanded severance pay from their morally bankrupt employers: Which Side Are You On?

Reece, like Nina Simone, was not alone in drawing from the conflicts in Appalachia to provide a quintessential American form of nonviolent achievement.

Black History Month was started by former West Virginia coal miner — the historian Carter Woodson -- who at one point could find a teaching job only in West Virginia. Booker T. Washington rose out poverty in Appalachia, as did the pioneering black nationalist Martin Delany; Nikki Giovanni, the godmother of black-arts poetry has hill roots; the legendary novelist William Demby, the last living writer of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote about his native West Virginia and its "beetlecreek"; the jazz and blues legends W.C. Handy, Bessie Smith, and country legend Leslie Riddle, who transcribed songs for the Carter Family for years, drew from the forests; Harvard literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. invoked the environment of his West Virginia past in his memoir, Colored People.

Four months before Sister Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, she took a seat at a radical folk school in Appalachia, where she learned a ballad -- "We Shall Overcome" -- and said that for the first time in her life she had met white people she could trust. The Highlander Folk School trained the shock troops of the Civil Rights Movement.

In fact, "All the News That's Fit to Print" came from Appalachia, a motto applied by a young Jewish publisher from Knoxville and Chattanooga, who resurrected The New York Times in 1896 and set its course for world success. Adolph Ochs, like Cormac McCarthy, thrived on all of those hill stories.

As Gladwell writes, "Cultural legacies are powerful forces."

Or, in the words of the Asheville novelist Thomas Wolfe, one of the greatest literary successes in New York City, hill folks have come down from these hills and "changed the great American destiny."

The first step in this process in the 21st century is for New York to end its use of mountaintop removal coal, and allow Appalachia's true cultural legacies to rise again.

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