"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting."---Part One

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting."---Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is Part One. Part Two is here.

I'm going to try to write about a few people---artists, really---in the most caring way that I can. I don’t know these people, and I’m not sure that I’m up to the task of writing clearly about them in the terms that I want to use, that come most naturally to me. And I don’t want to be sentimental here, but I do want to honor them and something of their lives, their parts of something much bigger than we are that runs through their lives.

The first people who I want to mention are the Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers band. I don’t know how I missed them for so many years. They’re a pretty well-known bluegrass band and they do lots of bluegrass gospel, but I just found out about them last week. Their “Readin’, Writin’, Route 23” tells a story held in the hearts of the hundreds of thousands of people who left Appalachia and the South between the 1930s and the early 1970s. Many of them took U.S. Route 23 north, but they also took it south on weekends and holidays. If that was all that the band had done I would still be a fan, but the instrumental work on their ”O-Hio” and the vocals they manage in “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” touch me. I think that they will touch you, too.

Now as we go a little deeper the writing gets a little more complicated.

J.R. Shuck is a painter living in West Virginia. All I know about J.R. is what is said on J.R.’s flickr page: their hometown is Weyanoke, West Virginia in Mercer County; J.R. is a retired artist who still paints; they attended Matoaka High School, and Bluefield State College in West Virginia; J.R. has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University in New York; and, if you want J.R. to paint something or somebody you can get on a list and expect to wait.

This is his painting of Pageton, West Virginia. Pageton is in McDowell County not far from the West Virginia-Virginia state line, and you can get to North Carolina and Kentucky pretty easily from there. In fact, I think that you can get to U.S. Route 23 with a little time but not much trouble. I was surprised to find that Pageton has a Wikipedia entry and that it tells us that Pageton has less and 200 people. It’s poor, but it isn’t the poorest community in the region. 

I want to recommend that everyone visit J.R.’s flickrpage here and study what you’re looking at. Study and feel what you see there. Most of the paintings will give you insight into the lives of others and where they live. Ask yourself how you would be different if you lived in one of those places or if the people in those paintings were your kin or neighbors. What would you say to them if you ran into them at the store or at church? Can you worry a little bit about those soldiers or coal miners? Do those children make you smile, and do you worry for those old people?

I don’t know much about art. I barely know what I like in art. But I do think that good art invites you in and teaches you something about the bigger world while it also represents your lived experiences. It doesn’t so much tell you that you’re on the right track and that everything will be fine so much as it helps you see yourself and your experiences from a different point of view and helps you to make changes.

Now, there is a lot of discussion about what a “holler” is and the best place to sort this out is in the pages of The Mountain Eagle newspaper, published in Whitesburg, KY. and one of the better newspapers in the United States. According to an article that ran in the newspaper on May 23, 2018 a holler is between two mountains but “too narrow to be a valley.” And he goes on to say:

A holler has a head and a mouth. The head is as far as you can go, and the mouth is where the creek runs into a larger stream of water. 

A holler can have houses spaced out on both sides of the road. You can ‘holler’ from one house to the other to tell the latest news. It may have several branches of forks. 

A holler may have a small grocery store at its mouth, and if you see someone walking to the store, give them some money and your list and they will bring your groceries back with them. Or, let them check your mail… 

You knew everyone living in the holler. It may be a few hundred yards long, or more than a mile from the mouth to the head. 

If your girlfriend lived up in the holler, everyone knew what time you went in and what time you went out, because their dogs would bark at you as you passed their house. 

A holler is a place where you can sit on your front porch in the cool of a spring day and hear a whip-poorwill symphony. Then Old Uncle John would get out his fiddle (not to be confused with a violin) and play until he got tired, his music echoing all over the holler. 

A holler is a place where the sun comes up late and sets early. After the sun sets, it’s still a couple of hours before it gets dark. 

It’s a place where you can let your young’uns, dog, cat and chickens run loose in the yard. 

A holler is a place where the kids can build a dam in the creek and have a good place to cool off and play. 

A holler is a good place to live, raise your young’uns, and have fun. It’s a place where the mountains are your playground. 

I think that’s good poetry, and I think that you can see that and feel it in some of J.R.’s paintings. 

I never lived in a holler but I did spend lots of time in patches and patch towns. One of my great aunts lived in a coal patch and her brothers lived a short distance up the road from her. The house that my father was born in and that his grandparents both died in was across the road. Back in the 1930s there was a family fight that no one would talk about or could remember the reason for, but every day for the next 40 years or so my great-aunt and my great-uncles passed on another without speaking. And if you went to visit my great-uncles at night and stepped into their shack you just saw two glowing pipes in the dark because they didn’t have electricity. I didn’t know that my great-aunt had full indoor plumbing until after she died because everyone used the outhouse. The mine that my family worked in was there--the place where my great-aunt’s husband had been killed and where my great-grandfather became an invalid. This was where my grandmother and her brothers met hoboes while they walked the railroad tracks to school and where they got stories that they told me. 

The houses up there were split, with two families in one big house divided in the middle. The family that lived next to my great-aunt would fight a great deal and throw dishes. They would break the supposedly unbreakable Correlle dishes and get new ones from the company after they returned the pieces. The year I was born there were terrible storms and my great-uncles got out some feed corn for the deer and put it out on the road. People were so poor and hungry that they came out in the snow and picked up the corn to eat. Hollers and patches are full of stories and memories. 

My point to here is that J.R. Shuck and Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers are telling you stories in their different ways. I hope that we can all slow down a bit and listen to one another’s stories and tell stories of our own. You know, I don’t care if a story is true in an all of its details. What I do care about is that someone is trying to tell someone else a tale that is important to them, that has meaning to them. I put coon hunting aside a long time ago, and I would never do that again, but coon hunters had story-telling down to an art, and a good story from a coon hunter painted a picture in your mind.

Read Part Two here.