Appalachian Figures On an overcast Monday in early spring 1985, two people cutting through a familiar dumping spot along U.S. 25E near Gray, Kentucky, noticed an old refrigerator lying on its side off the road at a place locals call Gilliam Hill. When they opened it, they did not find scraps or empty jars. Inside was the body of a small red haired woman, folded into the cabinet and left among the trash.

Appalachian Figures When you drop the needle on Big Joe Turner’s “Chains of Love” or Ruth Brown’s “5-10-15 Hours,” it is easy to imagine New York bandstands, neon bar signs, and late night subway rides. It is harder to imagine Bell County, Kentucky or a Harlan County rooming house.

Appalachian Figures In the spring of 2014, a small crowd of musicians and local historians gathered at Somerset Cemetery in Pulaski County, Kentucky. They were there to unveil a grave marker for a fiddler who had lain in an unmarked plot since 1951: Leonard Rutherford. Regional news coverage and musician forums described the ceremony as a long overdue tribute to a man many old time players rank among the finest fiddlers ever captured on record.

Appalachian Figures In the official records, Verlin Talmadge Adams begins life in a place that barely shows up on most maps. The 1940 United States census and a linked World War II era index list him as born on 14 July 1918 in Burnwell, a Pike County coal camp on the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork.

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.