Appalachian Figures George Raymond Stotser was born on April 21, 1935, in Lawrenceburg, the seat of Lawrence County in southern Middle Tennessee. His parents, Garold Morton Stotser and Retha Marie Aker, had made their way south a few years earlier from the Midwest, part of a quiet migration that tied Iowa farm country to the hills and ridges of Tennessee.

Appalachian Figures On a June afternoon in 2013, friends and family gathered at Colonial Heights Baptist Church in Kingsport, Tennessee, to remember James Calvin Bird. A week later, another crowd filled Central Baptist Church in Corbin.

Appalachian Figures On many winter nights in Lexington, Kentucky fans walk into Rupp Arena, look up, and see a familiar mountain name stitched in white on a blue banner: BIRD, with the number 22. Some remember hook shots and box scores. Others only know that the jersey belongs to an older era, when a tall forward from Corbin helped carry Adolph Rupp’s program through the middle years of the 1950s.

Appalachian Figures Every July, Southern gospel fans file into downtown Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, for the James D. Vaughan Quartet Festival. The Crockett Theatre lights up, quartets swap songs late into the night, and vendors sell glossy songbooks that trace their lineage back to a man who started with a shaped note hymnal called Gospel Chimes in 1900.

Appalachian Figures In the early twentieth century Lawrenceburg, county seat of Lawrence County, Tennessee, sat far from the sea. It was and remains a small Appalachian county seat on the Highland Rim, included today among the counties of Appalachia as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Appalachian Figures In the summer of 1815, a boy named Reuben May was born on Robinson Creek in what is now Pike County, Kentucky, into one of the most connected families on the Big Sandy. Later records from Wisconsin and a century’s worth of genealogical work agree on those basic facts: he was born June 23, 1815, in Pike County, son of Thomas Phillips May and Dorcas Patton, and he grew up on his father’s substantial mountain estate.

Appalachian Figures At the entrance to Morristown Regional Airport in East Tennessee, a bronze bust of a woman with neatly waved hair greets visitors. The plaque beneath it reads “Evelyn Bryan Johnson” and “Mama Bird.” Behind that nickname sits one of the most remarkable aviation careers in American history.

Appalachian Figures If you drive along the Sacramento River today and cross over to Grand Island, you will find the tiny town of Ryde pressed in between levees, orchards, and the slow brown water of the Delta. Local lore sometimes says Ryde got its name because its founder was born in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, across the Atlantic. The land records tell a different story.

Appalachian Figures By the late 1970s a woman in her sixties from rural Laurel County began turning the stories she had carried all her life into a public record. She had spent decades on a farm along Muddy Gut Creek, raised children, worked tobacco auctions in London, and buried a husband. Then a Corbin newspaper editor asked her to write about a church trip to the Holy Land, and the door opened.

Appalachian Figures On the hill above modern Pikeville, Kentucky, Dils Cemetery looks down on a town that has grown far beyond the nineteenth century river village Randolph “Ole Ran’l” McCoy knew. His stone stands among those of his wife Sarah, their daughter Roseanna, their son Sam, and other kin whose lives were tangled with one of the most written-about family conflicts in American history.

Appalachian Figures Corbin High School students in the twenty first century mostly know Rodger Bird as a name on a wall, a retired number, and a story their grandparents tell about an undefeated season in 1960.