Appalachian Moonshine - In the Pale Moonlight

Appalachian Moonshine – In the Pale Moonlight

"you'll just lay beneath the junipers, as the moonshine's bright....watchin' those jugs a fillin'...'neath the pale moonlight."  refrain from the song Copper Kettle.

I'm a big fan of the TV show “24” with +kiefer Sutherland . The reason I like that show (other than Kiefer Sutherland always out of breath, getting into and out of trouble saving the country) is because I use the concept of the show and apply it to history.  The show is created to reflect what is called, “real time”. Meaning at the same time there are different scenarios of occurrences happening with different people. Events occurring parallel, happening all at once, that make up the history of our lives that effect society as a whole. That is the way I look at history. There are individual people and parts that make up a whole story.

Johnny Witt and my father, Donald Bowling.
Dad gives his version of working for
moon shiners in the audio video on this blog.
Later these two would join the Army together.
My dad would make a long career out of the military.

I only speak about my own family history for the most part on this blog. We are only one very small, tiny part, of a very large story. Getting as many of those tiny parts put together as possible, gives us a better view of the Appalachia we know and love.

The current trend is to reinvent our history by being so ashamed of certain stereotypes to want to leave certain stories or different parts out. To avoid time periods or events in history that can be or have been stereotyped, instead of confronting that history with the truth, has the effect to leave gaps in our history. We have allowed the creation of a skewed misunderstood version in the story of the Appalachian people. As a historian, I just can't abide by that, nor take a shine to it.

The worst for me is stereotypes of the moonshiner, who is portrayed as a back woods, hooligan of Hollywood that inhabited Appalachia. Some would have fit the stereotype. Most though in my family held other jobs. It was not every one's story to be a part of the illegal whiskey making tradition in Appalachia though alcohol manufacturing, legal and illegal was a part of a long history in our mountains.

I have found to get anyone to speak about the moonshiners in their families comes with a great deal of “anxiety and “shame”. Is that shame left over from the days of local preacher's condemnations, like our area's famous Robert Sheffey laying down his black sheepskin prayer rug in the road when he came across a moonshine still and praying for the moonshiner's destruction (which I'm told he did to a relative or two), or is it the broad stereotype of moonshine ruination with the run down shack, overgrown fields, dirty kids, all because daddy's drunk making moonshine?  The profession today is met with disdain and many mountain folk are cautious about even telling the moonshiner tales. But moonshine was a business occupation and the stereotype of total lawless disregard doesn't fit my family though the occupation was one very entrenched in our family history.

I don't understand why a family history of moonshiners causes so much concern. Why it is with even some of our tourism initiatives there is a conscious effort in many circles to try to evade the alcohol story at all that is a part of our history?

As an example, recently they moved my cousin's beer joint building to Crab Orchard museum to use as a display and meeting place. It was a pretty famous place in our area just for the politicians that would show up. I will have to write that story later. I was unaware of the building being moved until I visited the museum and I asked the director, "Why did they moved Cousin Jr.'s beer joint?" She went, “Sshhh! We don't call it a beer joint!”

Yes, it had the nickname of the Frog Level Yacht club, and it was sort of a "store" that 30 years ago was a gas station (which is what they prefer to call it). It boasted the oldest tavern license in Virginia, handed down through the family for over 150 years until June died, but being corrected not to call it a beer joint or tavern which is really what we knew it as? You just have to shake your head and say, "OK, if you say so."

Junior did not sell many groceries but sold nabs, soda pop and beer...tons of BEER!. When it was a gas station there just was not enough parking and a patron would have to come in to ask someone to move away from the pumps so he could get gas.  In all the times I visited Junior we never bought gas. It was always too hard to get to the pumps.

But June Bowling had the best conversations of the day and could easily relate history and issues of the past with the present. There was hardly any local historical subject, whether it be politics, events, people or places, he didn't know something about. Add the best cooler's in the county to keep that brew icy and that is what made this place special.

It's the attitude of getting away from the alcohol part, which other than June, is what made Junior's place what it was, I'm having trouble with. Call it a store/service station, but we who were patrons of the place did not think of it in those terms. If it cleans it up for "their" perceptions from a beer joint/tavern to sell it and preserves the building...go for it. But something is getting lost in the translation.

I have all my life heard so many stories of our family and their participation in the moonshine and alcohol business. As you can see, I have a hard time in general dealing with the animosity towards those stories by other family members as well as now members in our community actually wanting to suppress or change the view of actual events or original perceptions of places. I write this post because I believe to get the whole picture, those stories need to be told. With that in mind, let's talk about Moonshine.

My first encounter with moonshine was in the mid 60's. I was at an aunt's house playing with some cousins. I remember you could get shrimp cocktail in these individual small glass containers and my family would save those as glasses for us kids. Kind of the pre sippy cup. You asked for a drink of water and they would give you one of these hour glass small glasses. If it was broken it was just a junk jar not one of the good matching glasses.

My cousins and I had been chasing each other playing whatever games kids played. I had been given a glass of water during this and I left it on the table and ran back outside. In the meantime, I had not realized that my father and my uncle had pulled two of these glasses to raise a drink of shine to each other. When I ran back in and grabbed what I thought was my glass off the table, before my father could stop me, I took a large gulp! I was probably 6 years of age. It burnt all the way down and all the way back up!! I couldn't breath, my eyes teared up, I was throwing up, it was awful. Needless to say I never did ever like moonshine. That one encounter broke me of ever having the habit.

Through the years the tales of moonshiner exploits of the family would leak out. Usually in hushed tones. No one actually came out or discussed often that there were moonshiners among us. It came out in rifts and stories. I became aware of a big rift between my grand mother's Hazel Burress's family and my grand father's Wesley Bane Boyle's family. I wrote about my grandfather and his participation at the Bristol Sessions with the West Virginia Coon Hunters in an earlier article.

Bane's side of the family said he would have made the big time had he not ran across my other grandfather Stewart Burress. Stewart Burress was a kind, good, hardworking and honest man. I remember him as a soft spoken storyteller and have written of him in other stories in this blog. Even when he was mad he never sounded loud at all. His official trade was as a black smith making hand forged tools. But he like others in the mountains had another profession. As a matter of fact, his daughter Callie said her pappy had told her he could not remember a time his side of the family did not make corn whiskey. Stewart Burress was known as a moonshiner of quality liquor in the hills of Bland, Tazewell and Mercer Counties.

Now this is where the story gets hard to tell, because it WAS A BUSINESS. Grand Daddy Burress worked for and distributed his liquor through mainly one man, the Sheriff of a local county. I believe this is one reason why there is silence in the telling of the moonshiner tales. There were many business men and elected officials also in the trade network. And many of their descendants are still elected officials and businessmen.

It's not something you want known that your upstanding family ancestor might have walked a little on the wrong side of the laws. But with hundreds if not thousands of gallons of liquor being produced on a weekly basis you know it had to have a distribution network for that much shine. It happened and is as much a part of the mountain history as anything else. Dave Tabler displayed this in his story of Congressmen John Wesley Langley and his wife Katherine Langley. John's wife Katherine was elected to his seat while he was in prison serving a sentence for violating the Volstad Act.

In an interview in 1992 with Stewart Burress's daughter, Callie Burress Boyles, (Callie married Bane's brother, David Brown Boyles), her greatest hate and worst memories growing up were worrying about a barking dog. Where she lived as a girl it meant sometimes customers who knew her daddy but more often the dreaded revenuers. She remembered that when customers came they were kept in the house until someone would fetch a jug from the hiding place usually hidden in the creek or the spring in mason jars.

Callie and her sister Hazel, my grandmother, met Bane and Brown Boyles because their father, Granddaddy Stewart, hired them to run the liquor to the distribution points for the sheriff. The liquor was usually hid in a wagon hauling coal or a truck hauling other goods.


Late in 1927, Stewart Burress told Bane he was getting out of the liquor business. Federal revenuers were descending upon the mountains. He had been warned by the sheriff that even the High local sheriff could not protect them against the federal government. He warned Granddaddy Bane not to run or deliver any more. He was right. While searching through newspapers of 1927 between January and August, 136 moonshine stills had been busted up in the areas around Mercer County.

In those records, I learned how much of an extended family business it was. There in news accounts were Uncle Sid, Uncle Hiram, Uncle Fred, Cousin Farley, (who was preacher on Sunday). All those news notices of arrested men relatives. (I was going to share excerpts of those actual articles but I've misplaced my file. Means maybe another article in the future when I find it.)  Makes the song, "Copper Kettle", a family anthem!

Granddaddy Bane didn't listen as most of the young men did not listen. Shortly after recording at the Bristol Sessions he too was caught transporting illegal liquor and sent to prison. It did end any chances he had of a recording career.

Thus the rift in the family. My Aunt Mable, Granddaddy Bane's sister, more than once told me, "that if Bane had not met that Stewart Burress and got caught with that illegal shine, he would have made it."

I don't believe that was true as he took his own chances. Everyone knew someone in the business or participated somehow for it to go on as long as it did. My father in the video above relates the campaigning that was done at the polls with moonshine and related a time that when he was 17, he was hired as a lookout. He was always real happy when the run was through because if they would have caught him it would have been the same 3 years in a Georgia prison just for being a lookout. First guard duty he ever had he said and it prepared him well for guard duty in World War II.

Now were some family members still in it after the 20's and 30's? I don't really know. But there was this 1950's Ford in the family. I remember it well because my mother absolutely LOVED that car. We came, “Up home” for one of our usual visits when my dad was in the military in Texas and my Granddaddy Bane told my mother someone had a great deal on a car. We had an old blue station wagon we had traveled in but I remember she bought this Ford very cheap.

I also remember riding in it following the station wagon back to Texas thinking how big inside it was. In later years, my mother talked about that car. It was her favorite she said of all the cars we had owned. I was a grown adult before she told me what was so special about that car.

It was a moonshiners car. She told me it had a clear title, she even stayed an extra day to make sure of that by putting it in her name before she left. She thinks it was just being, "looked for". When she bought it in the early 60s, they would have had to, "look for it", in Texas.

It was a special car. First, the sound of the motor wasn't like any other motor I have ever heard in a car since. A low rumble that sounded like it was saying in a bass voice, blub, blub, blub. The back seats were so odd because they had hinges on both sides that flipped up on the top and the bottom creating hidden compartments.

Though I can't remember how, she said the springs under it were reinforced to haul heavy loads but didn't have an over amount of extra springs under it. My mother told me extra springs on a car were the first thing law enforcement looked for during that time. Instead the front fender's and bumper of this car were weighted with lead molded into them. When I asked her who did the modification on the car she matter of fact said,  "this was courtesy of some kith who worked in the railroad machine shops." An old moonshiner's trick so that when there was a load in the back, the motor end didn't rise up.

My mother's favorite car had a lot of power to fly down the road and in the same way it was made for hauling a heavy load of moonshine, also worked well for hauling 5 children around. I was amazed she knew so much about this subject. When I asked whose car it was and whether it was family. She cut her eyes at me in a way that said, I wasn't to ask, she wasn't telling and she never did. I don't know of any family members today that carry on or even talk about the tradition. Somehow it just died out like so many of our older traditions. I think about it though when I make Dandelion wine.

In the history of my family and extended family, there were people of all types of occupations, miners, railroaders, teachers, laborers etc. In that group were also saloon keepers, owners of beer joints and moonshiners. Alcohol is a staple throughout our American history and though it has had it's bad historic reputation of being the cause of ruination, it was also a builder of personal fortunes and empires, whether legal or not. That's part of the American story and in my opinion we should not hide it in our Appalachian story either.

Copyright 2007-2016 Denise A. Smith

The Fatigue of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

In dealing with any illness it is the symptoms that make it worse. In this blog, coming up on July 4th, 2013, I have about 9 drafts of articles and each one I have quite a bit of material for. With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, (what they ended up giving me as a diagnosis when I didn't recover from the virus's I had), and heart problems, the worst part is having the energy to put together those ideas while being so tired.  When you are tired the brain fog takes over and so I have to work when my mind is not as tired or the articles won't make sense. Even to me.

I went to my doctor's this week and his frustration is the same as mine. There is no cause for Fibromyalgia nor CFS and thus no cure. All he can do is treat symptoms and those can change on a daily basis. What is the connection to the two diseases or to tick diseases? I was diagnosis with Fibro years ago and laughed at it. I thought it was more my working 2 jobs, while going to school full time with 2 kids and a disabled husband as the cause of aches and tiredness. Worked for years with it before developing full blown Chronic Fatigue Syndrome two years ago.

But research on these illnesses are coming out. Some hope comes through in articles like this: Cause for Fibromyalgia mystery solved. Vascular... imagine that as a possible cause. We have hope that one day the causes and cures will be found. In the meantime I juggle symptoms while trying to live some kind of a normal life.

So I thought I'd list some of the articles I'm working on. My last one...thank goodness I had been working on for a while. Ya'll tell me if this blog gets too disjointed and doesn't make sense. Be my editors so to speak.
Articles In Process:

Jenny Wiley story - Jenny Wiley was a woman who was captured by Indians in 1789 in Bland County, Virginia and taken to Kentucky. Quite a famous case in our area. I was working on that research when I became ill. I am still working on it but writing as I go. It will take a while to get that post up because there are some loose ends and it depends on my brain as to whether what I find makes sense but I am getting there. What I'm learning so far is the official story is a bit flawed and I have to verify those flaws.

Ned Sizemore Clan- You are Native but You Can't Claim That Tribe -  Many folks in my area are kin to Ned Sizemore who was a Native American out of North Carolina. His family applied to claim on several different rolls for benefits and recognition. Each one was quite odd in that none of the commissioners denied they were Native, they just denied them rights of each tribe they said they belong to. A new Melungeon DNA project proves their Native blood line. I'm working on that article to discuss the problems with Native American Appalachian Ancestry and trying to have a connection or recognize that. This one may be two articles. I am toying with that.

Search for Grand Dad's Music. This is the story of my Grandfather Wesley Bane Boyles who was a member of the West Virginia Coon Hunters. A band that played at the infamous Bristol sessions in 1927. The Birth of Country Music. This one is about finished and will be posted first. Mainly because I wrote most of it for the family years ago.

Moonshine Beneath the Pale Moon Light-  Story of moonshiners in my family gathered from news articles and oral history.  I'm trying to record the song Copper Kettle (kind of the family anthem) the way my grandfather taught me. But the old mountain dulcimer won't stay in tune. And these days I sound like a bathtub baritone, great sounding under water!!

Outhouse Stories- Build it Down Wind of the House, Boys -  This one is a further take on the outhouse in Appalachia. With stories gathered from family and friends of their experiences with having to use an outhouse.

Places in our area. Different events places I visit. Have a couple of those in the works. Have to promote our AREA!!

And many, many more.  But I am tired this week. The illness is beating me up pretty good. So I will quit for now. Some have asked why I don't write a book....well I am doing that too... a novel...began years ago.

But I don't know what the future holds. This illness has thrown me for a loop.  It is more important for me if we are going to dispel the myths about Appalachia than Appalachian people are going to have to tell their stories. This is just my family and mine. There are so many good Appalachian bloggers. I really enjoy +Dave Tabler blog, +Gary Holbrook website and Granny Sue the storyteller and antique hunter. Please spread the word and subscribe to all of us. And if you have one about Appalachia let me know. I want to do a list on the side bar to promote that too. Blessings to all.

Johnny Depp's Mother is Appalachian? What Does This Mean to Be An Appalachian?

All photos on this page are from my family albums. This is my mom.

I have been trying to write this blog post for months. Even the title I can not decide. Should it be, "Who is an Appalachian?," "What is an Appalachian?", or "Where are Appalachians located?" It is such an elusive broad topic for this Appalachian woman, I kept putting it off. But everyday something else pops up about Appalachia. In my mind, because we keep being labeled not in a good way, I think it is important to try to put it in some kind of perspective.

Then +Johnny Depp ,.... BLESS his heart....said something about his mother's Appalachian roots and a flood gate opened in my head. I will say I am a little upset with what he said, and I am a Johnny Depp fan, but now, however I say it, something HAS to be said.

This is not going to be some scholarly article. I can write on that level but scholars write for scholars and I'm of the opinion they like to use words that are mostly....well... for scholars. I am of the opinion also many need to be beat over the head with a dictionary.

Why worry with what is an Appalachian? Because my family has been located here in the Virginia/North Carolina/West Virginia mountains for many, many generations and that makes my grandchildren and my family, even those that live at a distance, of or pertaining to, or located in Appalachia, Appalachian. We deal with what ever that means every single day. Our history, our culture, the way we talk, how we live, are all effected by others perception of Appalachians but most importantly our own perception of ourselves.

Today what brought up my desire to write about this topic again was this article in the upcoming July 4th Rolling Stone Johnny Depp interview.   Where even Johnny Depp says, "My mother was raised in a shack, in the wilds of Appalachia, where the toilet was an outhouse."  He was using the reference to child rearing practices of butt whooping, which was a more universal common practice whose use has changed. The violence alone of "spare the rod, spoil the child" practice was in a much broader religious use than just in Appalachia, but I took what he was saying was his mother didn't know better because of where she was raised. I understand what he's saying about child rearing today is better and less violent but .... mentioning it with Appalachia, shacks and outhouses.....well hurt my feelings.

Sigh......I, for one, have a very different understanding of Appalachian outhouses. Always have. Given the modern problems we have with sewer systems sometimes it would be preferable to have an outhouse! I even argued at a meeting on museum displays that we should not downplay the existence of outhouses in our Appalachian story. I knew many a fancy house with an outhouse just because a septic system could not be put in. It wasn't just the shacks in Appalachia that had an outhouse. There are modern businesses today that have tanks in the ground that need a pump and haul system in Appalachia.

I spoke about that in another blog post. But those two words, "outhouse" and "Appalachia", automatically only "down trodden poor ignorant people" comes to mind. Perhaps his mother was from a poor family with an outhouse, but it seems like I have to defend this subject all the time to those not understanding the make up of the ground, especially in my part of Appalachia, with the nature of building sewer systems.

My grandfather in the 1960's lived in the Bluefield, WV city limits in a four room house he built himself with gravity flow water and an outhouse.  We really didn't consider ourselves "poor" but from the outside looking in I guess folks would think that.

All my life outhouses are just something we lived with and I was born in the 50's. In the 70's and 80's I was living in houses with an outhouse.  In the early 80's, I had a friend that lived in Floyd County, VA in a 1930's home. It had gravity flow water and an outhouse. The land would not "perk" to put a septic system in and it's remote location meant no town sewer service so that also was out of the question.

I took another friend to visit who had never used an outhouse in her life. But this one was quite made up. This outhouse had a regular toilet seat, a red fuzzy seat warmer, a red rug, a framed picture on the wall, a magazine rack, a toilet paper holder and it had electricity ran to it for a light and a heater. The one who had never visited an outhouse was quite impressed.

Today we just have a septic system on this 150 year old house. The problem for that system is we hooked the water up to a treated public water system and it's killing our septic system. Building a sewer plant in an area as rocky and winding in this part of Appalachia for a few people is quite costly. I had an engineer tell me that an outhouse would be more eco-friendly than our septic systems which are failing. Some of us Appalachians have always realized an outhouse can be the results of issues beyond anyone's control and know how to live with an outhouse as a resource. Today modern solar compostable toilets are a blessing in this area. Sorry Johnny, my point is we don't see ourselves in that same "poor" light for having to use one.

So what is an Appalachian and where is Appalachia?  Wiki gives this definition: Appalachia is a cultural region in the eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York state to northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.^[1] While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountain in the U.S. state of Alabama, the cultural region of Appalachia typically refers only to the central and southern portions of the range. As of 2005, the region was home to approximately 23 million people.^[2] 

The Appalachian Regional Commission has a map of Appalachian Counties. From Maine to Mississippi the trouble really begins because there is such a great diversity of people within the Appalachian geographic region itself to even try to define what is an Appalachian.  Many don't take too kindly to say that the only cultural area is in the central or southern portions of the range. There is also a wide spectrum of the economic base from millionaires to miners as well as different ethnicities and races which are comprised in this area called Appalachia.

I have another friend that says he can beat me on the diversity issue of an Appalachian because first he's black, with Native American and an Italian grandmother!  He also says the being a black/Native American/Appalachian now days on the discrimination scale is a triple whammy.

Northern Appalachians say there is a different culture in Southern Appalachia. Many say the Southern Appalachian stereotype gives other Appalachians a bad name. I became very upset once in college because my professor said that the moonshining, blue grass music picking Appalachian was a myth or a stereotype perpetuated by Hollywood. Okay I can tell the difference but EXCUSE ME?  He just had told me my whole family history and experience was a myth? And that was not true!!

But in talking to him over the years what we came to understand is that it was a different history and experience for his Appalachian family. They lived in a town with water and sewer in a slightly northern area from my family. Which leads me to believe that even some Appalachians are discriminatory towards other Appalachians.

Another real bone of contention is "dialects". The way we talk in different areas especially the southern mountains.  Appalachian English of which my family and community in my part of Southern Appalachia still speaks is disappearing. We have always had a hard time dealing with this issue inside the area and out. We are told in order to communicate we need to change our language to "proper modern English".  Never mind some of the forms of the Appalachian English we speak are older than that!  The dialects are different in different areas but one of the most glaring obvious clues you have that you are talking to an Appalachian, especially a Southern Appalachian, is when we open our mouths and speak.

I have a relative right now who works for a very large international company in our area who was given English courses and diction courses to get the "twang" out of his speech in order to be employed by this company. There are also people who work at call centers in our area that have said they experienced the same thing. One lady told me you can get written up for speaking any of the old dialect.  I find it ironic that Samuel Clemons/Mark Twain made a career of writing southern dialects into characters of his books, yet we are wanting to eradicate those in our area from speaking in their own. Is it any different getting someone from India with a dialect when you dial a call center for computer service?

Some say we are winning the dialect war because of words that were ours making it into modern English speech especially in the south. That somewhat may be true but the old speech I grew up with is dying out quite rapidly. I don't say, "If' in ye a mind to", that often as my aunts did. Plus there seems to be this modern move to eradicate it from our children completely in school.

How do you explain that to your grandchildren? How do you save our culture and dialect or at least honor it? Especially when you come across articles like this: Appalachian Americans the Invisible Minority . The goal is to help our children understand today they have to be multi-cultural in order to survive.

Our problems over the years seem to be the perceptions of those from outside the area looking at our people through their own ideals of what life should be like. Many times in the past it was just to exploit our resources then automatically deciding they needed to modernize and change us. As if we could not figure that out on our own.

My Aunt Florence once was told by a missionary, "We have come to save the Appalachian People." At which my aunt asked her, "From what?" She never got an answer. 

Another time a lady came by for a visit during canning season. She was visiting homes in the holler giving out brochures about proper canning. Now my Aunt was in her late 60's and had been canning all her life and never poisoned anyone. I remember when the lady left she said, "Good Lord, they are trying to save us to death!"

We here in this part of Appalachia know the War on Poverty of the Kennedy administration, especially in reference to our area, was based on a very skewed view of Appalachia. At that time there were millionaires mansions right along side a house with an outhouse in the same area they were giving out food stamps. Poverty, any where in the U.S., when you focus on it and take a picture of it, looks the same. The economic systems and politics that create that poverty are prevalent everywhere not just Appalachia.

I am an Appalachian woman by ancestry and I guess definition. When I was growing up we never considered ourselves "Appalachians". That really is a new recent term for our family. We called ourselves, "hillbillies" and to us it was a badge of honor. A redneck was a striking union member. They wore red bandanas around their necks so you would know who was who in a strike. That could be miners or railroaders either one.  It was turned into something completely different from what I grew up with.

I can see where we were different in our speech, our traditions and our location of family history. We never thought of ourselves in the perceptions I am hearing now. We never thought of any of our family as backwards or poor. An outhouse in Appalachia could just mean bad location for a sewer system. Just regular hardships of life.

In all my study of our family history that goes back on the eastern shores of Virginia 100 years prior to the Revolutionary War, to 1750's on the frontier, the "isolated" Appalachian just did NOT exist in my family!! EVER!!! They had kinship ties all over the United States traveling far and wide! Our family reunions look sometimes like the United Nations.

So what is an Appalachian? I think that is for us to determine now. Is it just people tied to a geographical area? Is it a separate distinct culture? To change the bad perceptions we are going to have to tell our actual stories and our history with an understanding that there were moonshiners, outhouses and millionaires all in the mix.

And Johnny Depp? I am sure your mother will never ever have to use an outhouse again. But I can bet that if all the worlds systems go into a crisis and the sewer systems quit working....you'd be asking her how to build and maintain one and she would KNOW!!  Appalachians from the wild have that knowledge.

Please feel free to comment your thoughts on these subjects.  Yes, I know I was a little hard on Johnny Depp...but I have just about all his movies. To me he's one of the best actors of our times. I am a big fan but that doesn't mean he ain't above reproach. None of us are. His mother is Appalachian and that to me makes him Appalachian, though he may be a refugee from us. As such he has to come to terms to what that identity means to him and his family and question do the outside perceptions of what is an Appalachian really fit?

August 2016 UPDATE Condolences to the Depp family on his mother's death. There is a saying here in the mountains...as long as our children's hearts beat and our grandchildren's hearts beat, so does ours.

On another note I love this song about Appalachians.