Tag: Appalachian Outlaws

Real-Life Outlaw Otto Wood Went Viral In The Thirties

In the early 1930s, the way for a story to go “viral” was by being sung about in a ballad. That’s what happened to Otto Wood, a real-life outlaw who grew up around Wilkesboro, North Carolina. He spent time with the Hatfields of southern West Virginia, became a famous moonshiner, and died in a shootout with police in 1930. Less than one year later, his story was told in the ballad “Otto Wood The Bandit,” recorded by Walker Kid and the Carolina Buddies.

True-life outlaw Otto Wood went viral in 1931 — one year after he was killed in a fatal shoot-out with a North Carolina sheriff. How does one go viral in the 1930s? For Otto Wood, it happened partly through newspaper accounts that laid the groundwork for a massive funeral and his subsequent commemoration through a ballad that’s still played today.

Plenty of Wood’s life set him up for his eventual fame. He grew up in the hills around Wilkesboro, North Carolina and lost a hand in a childhood accident. He spent time with the Hatfields of southern West Virginia in the early 1900s, and later became a famed moonshiner.

Legend has it Wood eventually ran into trouble with the law after an incident involving a pawn shop and a family watch.

Here’s how folk icon Doc Watson told it, on his album “Legacy” with David Holt, released in 2002.

“He had pawned his grandfather’s watch, needed some money real bad,” Watson said. “And he pawned it to Mr. A.C. Kaplan, who had a pawn shop in Greensboro, North Carolina. And he promised he’d be back in a short time to redeem the watch. And he had supposedly had a 30 day grace period, according to the agreement. But he went back in about 10 days and the old boy had sold his watch. And he [Wood] was really angry, flew into a rage, and there happened to be one of those old antique pistols … He snatched it up, hit the man over the head with it a little too hard. And he was sentenced for 2nd degree murder.”Wood subsequently escaped from the Raleigh prison where he was sent. In Watson’s telling, he “whittled a gun out of a cake of soap,” jabbed it into a guard’s back and coerced him into driving him away.

But it was his shootout with a sheriff in Salisbury, North Carolina, that entrenched his name in pop culture history.

“The sheriff who had been looking for him, Sheriff Rankin, saw him walking along the street, pulled over and told him to get in the car,” said North Carolina musician Holt, who often performed with Watson. “Otto got in the car and [then ] … opened the back door, rolled out on the ground, and pulled his gun. Rankin got out the front door and shot Otto across a Model A body. Otto shot at Rankin but he missed him, just nicked his ear. And Otto got hit right in the face and died. So that’s a pretty dramatic ending.”

The local newspaper reported that as many as 20,000 people attended Wood’s funeral and filed past his casket. Locals also raised money to send his body home to his mother in Coaldale, West Virginia.

A year later, in 1931 Walker Kid Smith wrote “Otto Wood the Bandit” and recorded it with the Carolina Buddies.

The chorus goes, “Otto, why didn’t you run? / Otto’s done dead and gone / Otto Wood, why didn’t you run / When the sheriff pulled out that 44 gun?”

The single sold a couple thousand copies. But one of them landed in the hands of Doc Watson. He recorded it for his 1965 album, “Doc Watson and Son,” which hit at the height of the ‘60s folk boom. Doc Watson went on to become an icon of the folk and Americana movement over the late 20th century.

And “Otto Wood the Bandit” was emblazoned into the American songbook. Musicians have been singing about Otto Wood ever since. Like “Slim” Smith, Norman Blake, Barbara Scott and JP Harris.

West Virginia musician Chance McCoy produced and played fiddle on the Harris version. McCoy and Harris didn’t get a chance to play the tune a lot together, especially once the pandemic brought live music to a halt. But they did tour together, and McCoy got to see a crowd in Germany respond to “Otto Wood.”

“We played a house concert in an apartment in Berlin, and I can remember that people were standing on the furniture,” McCoy said. “I remember playing that song, and this room full of 200 Berliners was singing along to ‘Otto Wood.’ I don’t even know if they understood a word, but it’s a good tune.”

So, as someone who’s been playing and singing this song for years — why does Chance McCoy think Otto Wood didn’t run?

“For Otto Wood, he had to end it somewhere,” McCoy said. “It certainly wasn’t going to be spending his life in prison. I think for him, the adventure was over, and he knew it. And it was better to go out in a blaze of glory than to fizzle out in a jail cell.”

David Holt has a different answer. Why didn’t Otto Wood run?

“I think he was trying to run — just the car was too short across and they shot him right in the head,” Holt said. “He was pretty bold, you know. He felt like the people knew him. People liked him. People weren’t afraid of him. So he’s like a minor celebrity. I think actually at the end, he was trying to get away from Sheriff Rankin. It just didn’t work. He would have run one more time.”

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, which is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to Inside Appalachia to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.

This Folkways story originally aired in the May 20, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Ginseng Reality TV: Cultivating Conservation or Encouraging Extinction?

A new reality TV show that features ginseng hunting premiered this week. Smoky Mountain Gold pits four teams against each other to see who can collect the most wild-ginseng. It comes in the wake of another reality show that aired in January this year, Appalachian Outlaws. Dried ginseng root sells for 400-900 dollars a pound, and these reality shows are generating a lot of new interest in the plant.  That might be a good thing for the ginseng industry… or it might not be.

Poaching Up-tick

Larry Harding is a ginseng farmer in Maryland. He cultivates the plant across 300 forest land acres; he sells seed, root, and even ginseng wine. He’s been in the ginseng business for decades. He says he gets hit by poachers every year, hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and losses. Just a few weeks ago while he was patrolling his fields in the middle of the night he spotted a few head lamps in his crop…

“I called the law,” Harding said. Catching a poacher red-handed, with a law enforcement officer, is one of the only ways to be able to successfully prosecute a poacher. That’s exactly what Harding did. He aided officers in the arrest and learned in the process that the men traveled some 400 miles from Kentucky to steal his ginseng.

It might sound like a scene from a reality show, but this is real life. Harding says everyone he knows in the industry is seeing more interest and more theft this year since ginseng has been in the TV spotlight.

“Since Appalachian Outlaws, I’ve talked to several different people who’ve been hit,” Harding said. “I’ve been hit three times this year.”

This year: West Virginia’s Division of Forestry reports a 300 percent increase in calls from people who want to know where to dig for ginseng and when; the Monongahela National Forest has issued twice the number of permits to dig; and the state’s Department of Natural Resources—which is in charge of enforcing the state’s ginseng regulations—reports increases in criminal activity.

The Slippery Slope to Extinction

“I know there’s no way we can continue down this path and still have something years down the road for my grandchildren,” said Lieutenant Woodrow Brogan, a law enforcement officer with the state DNR.  

He’s been involved in a separate, year-long investigation that recently lead to a $180,000 ginseng bust and the arrest of 11 people in just one region of southern West Virginia. They were charged with illegally harvesting wild ginseng, or illegally buying and selling it.

Lt. Brogan has been with the DNR for 20 years. He also takes part in the nearly 300-year-old Appalachian tradition of harvesting wild ginseng.

“My father taught me that you don’t dig the smaller plants,” Brogan said. “You always leave some crops for next year. That was the tradition that we had; and most ginsengers I knew growing up, they had the same type of mentality, of conserving the resource. What we’re getting into now-a-days, is there’s folks going out and the only thing that they’re seeing is dollar bills.”

Boom or Bust?

The main markets for ginseng are in Asia. It’s an extremely popular medicinal herb there, and has been for over 2,000 years.  Asian demand is increasing with booming populations and a growing middle class. That’s driving prices along with illegal harvesting in this country.  Lt. Brogan thinks West Virginia has reached a crisis point where action is needed.

Current regulations vary from state to state, but in West Virginia: you can only pick wild ginseng for three months in the fall, only plants that are older than 5 years, only in certain locations with permits or permission from landowners, and you must have root certified with a dealer licensed by the state These laws are designed to protect and preserve wild populations. But problems persist.

Program director of plant science at Shavers Creek Environmental Center at Penn State University, Eric Burkhart, thinks if the industry doesn’t get a handle on illegal activity, wild harvesting in the U.S. could soon go the way of Canada where it’s completely prohibited. He worries that would have unintended consequences.

“The concern there,” Burkhart said, “is that it would likely only drive out the good people who are involved in this industry—that is, the people who do have been following the rules, the people who do care about the plant, the people who do  every late summer and fall and look for the berries and seeds and replant them.”

But all the new enthusiasm for ginseng could have a silver lining. Researchers and enthusiasts are excited more people are growing the native plant. They say a healthy, properly regulated ginseng industry could bring all kind of benefits to Appalachia, from economic diversity, to ecosystem protection, to preservation of the region’s unique natural and cultural history.

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