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.

Appalachian Figures On a November day in 1829, in a hill country courthouse town not far from the Cumberland River, a baby boy named Shelby Moore Cullom came into the world. Most history books remember him as an Illinois politician, a longtime United States senator, and a key architect of federal railroad regulation and the Lincoln Memorial. Yet the paper trail of his life, from bank notes to obituaries, never stops reminding us where he began.

Appalachian Figures In the hills of southern Lawrence County, Tennessee, the unincorporated community of Westpoint sits close to the Alabama line, a small place where farms and timber once defined daily life. In 1903 a boy was born there who would spend his adulthood in steel hulls under the Atlantic and Pacific, help test lifesaving submarine escape gear, and take part in one of the most famous undersea rescues in American naval history.

Appalachian Figures In the summer of 1927 a barber from Corbin, Kentucky carried his banjo across the mountains to a makeshift studio in Bristol.

Appalachian Figures Born in a railroad town on the Tennessee and Alabama line, Robert Hitchcock Spain entered the world in 1925 as one small line in a county birth book. Long before he became a United Methodist bishop, an author, or a chaplain in Nashville, he was simply “Robert Hitchcock Spain” in the clerk’s hand at Lawrenceburg, the son of two public school teachers in Loretto.

Appalachian Figures In one often shared photograph from the Thacker coalfield, a teenage miner named Vito Ragazzo stands in a coal car at Aflex, Pike County. The caption notes that the picture was taken in 1944 and that the young man in work clothes would someday play college and Canadian professional football and then coach at Virginia Military Institute and Shippensburg. That single image holds several stories at once.

Appalachian Figures Corbin, Kentucky, does not usually appear in histories of Motown Records. On paper it is a small railroad town on the Whitley and Knox county line, remembered more often for a 1919 racial expulsion and for Colonel Harland Sanders than for rhythm and blues.

Appalachian Figures Most people who grew up with the Blondie movies or the Blondie radio show remember the sound first. A crash, a yelp, and then Dagwood Bumstead tumbling into the mailman again, arms and legs everywhere. For mid twentieth century audiences he was the most famous flustered husband in America, sprinting for the streetcar with his towering sandwich, forever late for work and forever forgiven at home.

Appalachian Figures Lois LaVerne Williamson came into the world on July 9, 1923, in rural Pike County, Kentucky, the daughter of coal miner Joseph Williamson and his wife Hester. Like many mountain families along the Tug Fork in those years, the Williamsons lived close to the seams that fed the postwar coal boom and just as close to the insecurity that came with it. From the start, music was the family’s other livelihood.