Closing reflections on the series and the world that birthed it

Appalachian Figures On an old Knoxville News Sentinel video, an eighty five year old man in overalls sits in his living room with a fiddle tucked under his chin. His bow arm moves with an easy swing that suggests a lifetime of tunes. The caption simply calls him an Appalachian fiddler, but old time musicians around the world know the name behind that bow: Clyde Davenport of Wayne County, Kentucky.

Appalachian Figures On a cold Saturday night in February 2014, worshipers gathered on a narrow Middlesboro side street and filed into a low white church that most people in town knew by sight even if they never stepped inside. The sign over the door read Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name.

William Manon Cornett’s name surfaces in Kentucky history at curious moments.

Appalachian Figures When the Jackson Times printed the obituary of Wilson Edgar “Willie Bill” Terry in February 1968, it introduced him as the oldest native-born Kentucky veteran and as a familiar figure to readers in Breathitt and Owsley counties.

Appalachian Figures On a winter night in Dayton, Ohio, the voice coming through the barroom speakers still sounded like Perry County. Harley “Red” Allen might have been standing under neon instead of a coal camp sky, but the high, fierce edge in his singing carried traces of the hollow where he grew up, Pigeon Roost in eastern Kentucky.

Appalachian Figures In Burnside, along US 27 above the Cumberland River, a metal roadside marker carries a familiar name for Wayne and Pulaski County people: Harriette Simpson Arnow, 1908-1986.

Appalachian Figures On winter Sundays in mountain churches from North Carolina to eastern Kentucky, somebody still calls out a number for a Christmas carol that is not in the high-church hymnals. Voices rise on “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem,” stitched into four part harmony from memory and from a little red or maroon songbook that has seen more revivals than holidays.

Appalachian Figures On a summer stage at Newport in the 1960s, a slight woman in a simple dress sat behind two microphones with a long, heart-cut instrument across her lap. The photographs show her face intent and calm as her fingers moved over the fretboard of a mountain dulcimer. For many in that audience it was their first glimpse of the old Kentucky instrument. For Jean Ritchie it was simply home carried onto a festival stage.

Appalachian Figures In February 1974 the Senate Commerce Committee met in Washington to consider two Coast Guardsmen whose careers had begun in the anxious days before Pearl Harbor. One was Rear Admiral Owen W. Siler, nominated to be Commandant. The other was Rear Admiral Ellis Lee Perry, a soft-spoken Tennessean from Lawrenceburg, nominated to become Vice Commandant, the second in command of the entire United States Coast Guard.

Appalachian Figures In the summer of 1843, a boy named Benjamin Franklin Burkitt was born just outside Lawrenceburg in Lawrence County, Tennessee. Later generations would know him simply as Frank, the editor in the wool hat from Okolona, Mississippi, who took on railroads, bankers, and the “Bourbon” Democratic establishment on behalf of small farmers.