The following are excerpts from an interview with Don West that appeared in a story about the hill country of southern West Virginia 25 years ago.
“They call us ‘hillbillies,’ and we’re supposed to be ashamed of that. They don’t remember that tens of thousands of southern Appalachian men volunteered for the Union in the Civil War. How many people know that one reason why West Virginia became a state was that the hillbillies rejected the idea of slavery? Why, the Underground Railroad ran right through our mountains.”
On the purpose of the Appalachian South Folklife Center, which Don West and his wife founded in Pipestem, W.Va., in 1967:
“Here, kids learn what schools often neglect to teach them — pride in being a mountaineer instead of shame at being a hillbilly. ... Our best young people are leaving the mountains and going to the cities for the jobs they can’t find here. We struggle to raise them, to educate them, and then they’re gone. We lose the human resources as well as the material ones.”
“All you hear about Appalachia these days is poverty and ignorance. We’ve been Dogpatched and Beverly Hillbillied to death. A lot of us have become ashamed of our traditions. Well, there are reasons for our poverty. Most of our major natural resources are owned by out-of-state interests, and have been ever since the Civil War. There’s been great wealth taken out of these hills, in coal and timber, but little of it stayed here. ... We need new leadership in the mountains to solve our problems — young people with a sense of their history and identity.”
© 1972 National Geographic Society
Other links to Don West articles:
-
Symbolism in Don West’s “And I Have Loved,” by Sara Dick
Selected poems of Don West
