Maybe it’s my interest in and love of the subject. Maybe it’s getting, at least in one part, a companion guide to Harlan County USA, with more words that belong to some of the faces and names I recognize. (Lois Scott, Sudie Crudenberry, Mickey Messer, Basil Collins all make their appearance, and on and on.) Or maybe it’s just that it’s a fantastic book. Eloquent, moving, fascinating, the opposite of condescending, a wonderful oral history from the place where, Portelli writes, “the language is still a cultural treasure, rhythmic and expressive, a marker of identity.”
Is there even any other kind of history? Per George Ella Lyon, here:
I certainly feel that I come out of an oral tradition. Of storytelling and singing that I thought everybody had until I went out into the world. I was really shocked when I went home with a college friend who lived in New Jersey and I was there for a whole weekend and her parents never told a single story. And I asked her when we left, “Are they shy?” She said, “No, why?” And I said, “Because they never told me anything.” And she said, “You didn’t ask for anything.” “Well, I don’t mean like information. I mean stories,” and she said, “Oh, you mean like your family.” And this was a revelation to me. And I was really frightened to think that they didn’t have stories.
I’d go so far as to say, pair this with Harlan County USA, and you’d have as clear a picture of coal country, of Appalachia, of even the South at large, as you could get in one place.
