Eastern Kentucky University - Milestone Yearbook (Richmond, KY)

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NTRODUCTION clannish fighting people, for its love of swift dance music and love of song. And for my life, I can not look upon Kentucky mountains as only a source of illegitimate news. I look upon these hills as one section of America that has not lost its local color, yet. My ambition has been to sing of my own hill people and not any other group; to portray my people in my songs to as near a likeness as I can possibly portray them. I hope that my first book. MAN WITH A BULL-TONGUE PLOW, will do at least one thing for poets un- born among the hills, and young poets who have just started to sing. I hope they will remain among our own people and sing, not as others would perhaps wish to hear them sing, but sing the songs which are before them to sing, of people living near the earth: of mountain oaks; rocks; people; wild llowers that adorn the rough slopes in the spring; summer; autumn. I hope one book will show them that art is about their feet (if my work can be called art) ; that poems are thicker than dead leaves that cover the Kentucky earth in autumn and that stories are thick as leaves that hang on the boughs when they first start coloring in Autumn. Life in every section has so much to be written and so much to be said. Life is so vast, so wretched, so beautiful. There is so much to life aside from living it. We should put a little of it on paper — the life about our own high country. We should not have the time to traipse here and there to gather life when we have an unsurpassed tradition of story, legend, song, behind us; when we are living on the inside looking out. Why can ' t some of our good dance tunes with the swift music in them be national? Why can ' t the pretty graceful movements in them be made national instead of being butchered and made fun of? Why can ' t youth, middle-aged, and old, write our stories, about us, and sing our songs? I leave this to you. Why do we not as native hill Kentuckians start a tradition of writ- ing to be handed down through generations?

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THE There is not a section of local color in America more colorful than the local color about us in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Our people have lived before us (our native blood) for centuries. They have wrestled with the rocks and the thin earth to make a meager living, but they have found enough to eat. They have owned their brains. They have been a free people — free as the wind that blows through the sawbriars and across the corn patches The earth that fed our native kin through life, usually holds them in death. Our people are born of mountain clay, live from the fruits of mountain clay, and the mountain clay drinks back their blood in the end. We belong to our mountain earth. Therefore, we should rise (our singers should) and sing of our mountain earth and its contents thereon. These people, our people, have a tradition of stories behind them. In many parts of the hills, and the hollows, we are still leaving tradition behind us. There are more stories and poems among us than we can ever write. Stories are as abundant as dead leaves on the trees in autumn. They are our stories. They are about the people who have lived among these hills and earned a meager daily bread from the rugged slopes. We should write them. We do not have the right to pass a tradition of our own and try to write things we have not lived and things we do not know. We are on the inside looking out. We have a better outlook on our own people than the writers who live so far away and come to our hill country to catch the pictures of us anyway they want to arrange us. It is my honest belief that there is enough fiction in the hills of eastern Kentucky for a Sir Walter Scott to write; enough poetry for a century of poets (they cannot get through singing of a land filled wit.h story and song as beautiful as eastern Kentucky is); enough legend, folk-lore, and fairy talcs for a William Butler Yeats to write. This patch of mountain local color seems, to me, similar to Scotland for its By Jesse Stuart

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THE 3n ffl em or tarn MARY L. SULLIVAN LUCILLE SHOUSE