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A Poet’s Album Of Pandemic Songs Is Getting A Vinyl Re-Release

Five years ago, the COVID-19 lockdowns kept a lot of people out of public spaces — and a lot of artists used that time to create. Like the Cornelius Eady Trio. The group is organized around Cornelius Eady, a poet and professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, whose writing has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. With the help of musicians Lisa Liu and Charlie Rauh, Eady puts his words to music.

This conversation originally aired in the March 16, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Five years ago, the COVID-19 lockdowns kept a lot of people out of public spaces — and the Cornelius Eady Trio used the time to document and record an album of music about it.

The group is organized around Cornelius Eady, a poet and professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, whose writing has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The Cornelius Eady Trio sees him put those words to music, with the help of musicians Lisa Liu and Charlie Rauh. During the pandemic, the group recorded, Don’t Get Dead: Pandemic Folk Songs by the Cornelius Eady Trio. It’s an album of songs about the COVID-19 pandemic.

The album has now been re-released on vinyl by Whitesburg, Kentucky’s June Appal Recordings. Inside Appalachia host Mason Adams spoke with Eady and Rauh about the making of the album and what it means now.

Adams: During the pandemic, especially those early days during the lockdown, a lot of people had the experience of being isolated and just seeing their friends only through screens. What led you to make the jump to making songs about that?

Eady: Necessity. I mean, truly just necessity. It’s that or you go crazy. If I was a painter, I probably would have stayed isolated in my studio and painted. What I did instead was to simply just pick up the guitar and start to write songs about what it felt like to be in that moment. It was a way of self defense. It was a way of trying to get some handle on it, to try to keep some sanity, and also to keep ourselves, keep us going as a band.

Don’t Get Dead: Pandemic Folk Songs by the Cornelius Eady Trio.

*Courtesy Photo*

Adams: On the Bandcamp page, you have a poem, “Corona Diary,” in the liner notes. Would you mind reading that?

Eady: (reads poem)

These days, you want the poem to be
A mask, soft veil between what floats
Invisible, but known in the air.
You’ve just read that there’s a singer
You love who might be breathing their last,
And wish the poem could travel,
Unobtrusive, as poems do from
The page to the brain, a fan’s medicine.
Those of us who are lucky enough
To stay indoors with a salary count the days
By press conference. For others, there is
Always the dog and the park, the park
And the dog. A relative calls; how you doin’?
(are you a ghost?). The buds emerge, on time,
For their brief duty. The poem longs to be a filter, but
In floats Spring’s insistence. We wait.

As I was reading the poem, I also remember that my sister also appears in this poem. “A relative calls; ‘how you doin’? (are you a ghost?)”. My big sister, Gloria, who died not of COVID but of a brain tumor two years ago, and that was when I knew it was serious. When my sister called to see how I was doing, I knew that was her actually, in one way, just saying, “Just in case I never get to see you again, I also want to say hello.” And then I knew how bad the virus actually was. I knew things were actually serious.

Also probably helped spark the song, “Thanks,” which is the next-to-last song on the project, where basically it is about saying goodbye. People calling and saying goodbye and leaving an email and stuff like that, because you never know. You never know, and suddenly you’re very aware of the fact that death is at the door or very close, and it could happen to you or could happen to somebody else. I mean, you haven’t talked to them in a few years, you might want to say goodbye to them.

Adams: That poem concludes, “when we wait.” And those days felt endless at the time. But time passed. The virus is still around, but the pandemic has faded into the rearview mirror, and a lot of those years have been memory-hold where people want to get back to “normal” and just move past them. Your songs provide a document of that time. So, when you listen back, what do you hear on those songs now?

Eady: What I hear is, memories of what it felt like to actually be there. What you can’t get across with a record is the sense of a feeling that it might be over, right? That this might be a plague, might be the plague, because at that time, there was no cure and no vaccine, and people were dropping like flies. Feeling that maybe, just maybe, you hit the jackpot, and this is going to be the plague, and it’s really going to wipe a lot of people out. Which it did, and you might be next. That feeling of dread, that feeling that maybe you’re not going to be able to push through this, this might be something you may not get through, that not just you may not get through, but maybe the culture may not get through.

Also, how confusing it was, all the different information that was coming in. First, you didn’t need a mask, and then suddenly you did need a mask. And then suddenly, you know you needed to wash your hands 15 times a day, or you didn’t really need to do it 15 times a day, or even deliveries have to sit on the porch for 15 minutes so the sun could kill all the [germs.] It was all this stuff that was going on, all this panic that was going on, but panic not in a way that was a crowd stampeding for a cliff. It was this quiet dread among the neighborhoods, among the houses. All I could do was write. I wasn’t going to cure anything, but all I could do was write and hopefully just keep at it. And so, all of that comes back.

Adams: This collection of songs y’all recorded during the pandemic was released in 2021 under the title, “Don’t Get Dead: Pandemic Folk Songs by the Cornelius Eady Trio.” Now it’s getting a vinyl re-release. How does it feel to get this recognition a few years after the fact, especially with these particular songs and the topics?

Eady: It feels wonderful. It feels wonderful that the record company was so supportive. They’ve been so supportive of this project from the start. It just thrills me that they like the material so much that they are allowing us to do this limited vinyl release of it. It’s great to hear the songs again.

Adams: Did this experience with the pandemic and recording these specific songs bring any permanent changes to the group and how you all work together?

Rauh: We all had basic recording setups, just from being professional musicians. But at least on my end, I had recorded my own music, which was just solo acoustic guitar before. I was used to doing that, but just that. I had never mixed or mastered or anything or had to collaborate with people remotely the way we were doing it. What’s fun about listening back to this record is we were figuring out how to do it in every possible way — not just conceptually, but technically. We were figuring out, how do we mix? I had to learn how to mix and master through this project.

So, making this record let all of us know, like, “Hey, we can do this. We can keep doing this, even when we can meet in person. We can meet in person and perform, but we can get ideas down, and we are getting better at it.” So, it changed. It added a level to the project where we used to only go into studios to record and then perform live. Now we can go into studios and record ourselves and we can perform live. It added another layer to expressing Cornelius’s work. I feel like having more control over how the music is produced makes it more authentic, and it makes it more personal. Cornelius will write a long form song in the folk tradition or the Appalachian tradition, even the storytelling format of the words are the focus of the song, and the music is supposed to be a vehicle for the message and the intention of the words.

When you do that, you don’t have the option to copy and paste and cut things up. You have to play it. You have to tell the story with the words. You can do a lot of takes of a song like that, but you can’t do a whole lot of editing to it because it just doesn’t work. Having the opportunity to get back to that style of recording was really satisfying for me as a musician, to play these songs and listen to the words and react to them while I’m playing them, knowing that I have to play the whole song.

There are studio editing capabilities, obviously, but I feel in the session work that I do, people jump at the point of, “Let’s do a bunch of takes, chop up all the takes and make a super take of that.” That’s a very common way of going about it. And the work that I’ve done, I’ve never been a fan of that. So, for me, it’s been really great. One of the silver linings of recording this way is that we got back to actually recording songs. You have to play them, they have to sound good at the end, and if it doesn’t, do it again, which is what I personally prefer. I feel like that does come through on this record, and it is fun to listen back to those songs and think that that’s what we did, and that’s part of the message. It’s part of making the music a personal vehicle to deliver what Cornelius is saying.

Eady: No complaints, Charlie!

Adams: We’ve talked about the songs in the moment and the mindset and the process. What do these songs have to tell us about life today, in 2025?

Rauh: When you think back to when that happened, it feels like it was in a different universe when all of that was happening. I like going back and listening to it. This is kind of a weird way to put it, but I like re-experiencing what it felt like, because we’re still here.

Eady: I was just thinking of the title song, actually, “Don’t Get Dead.” The title comes from a poet friend of mine who used to sign off her emails to me during the pandemic with, “Don’t get dead.” And she did it enough times that I suddenly realized, that might be a good title for a song, maybe a title for the project overall. But also a good motto for what was going on — that basically, you will get through this. Don’t get dead. We will get through this. There’s some place else to be that’s on the other side of this. It really is about that. It’s about survival and getting through it, and knowing, even if you’re losing people on the side and on the way, there’s still going to be a way to get through.

——

The album is, Don’t Get Dead: Pandemic Folk Songs by the Cornelius Eady Trio. It’s available from June Appal Recordings.

Traditional Music And Traditional Tattoos Live On At The Parlor Room

John Haywood of Whitesburg, Kentucky says he got his first guitar and his first tattoo when he was about 13 years old. These days, Haywood is the proprietor of Parlor Room Art and Tattoo in downtown Whitesburg. It’s a place where some people get inked up … and some play traditional music. It’s a place unlike any other, as Zack Harold reports.

This story originally aired in the March 16, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.

As a kid, John Haywood had two loves: art and music. When all his cousins were into sports, Haywood just wanted to draw and play guitar.

He eventually figured out a way to marry his two loves. After all, his favorite rock musicians were covered in tattoos.

“I started drawing tattoos on myself and on my friends with markers and fancy pens. It got to where people would ask me to draw a tattoo on them in school, with just a marker,” Haywood says. “We were so fascinated by it, when the opportunity came to get a real one, we jumped.”

“Real” is a relative term. It was a “real” tattoo in the sense that Haywood still has it. It was little less than real because he got it from a friend’s older brother, using purloined art supplies.

“He used a sewing needle and thread and India ink that I got from my middle school,” Haywood says. “Between the art department and the home ec department I was able to get everything I needed to do a tattoo.”

Haywood’s career as a thief was short-lived. His passion for art was not. He went on to study art at Morehead State University and later in grad school at the University of Louisville.

Once out of school, he was unsure what to do next. That’s when “Big Daddy” Trey Benham offered Haywood an apprenticeship at his tattoo shop in Fort Knox, Kentucky.

The Parlor Room owner and founder John Haywood in his art-covered tattoo shop.

*Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

But big city living grew tiresome after a while. Haywood moved back to Eastern Kentucky. He needed to make money, so he started looking for a job as a public school art teacher. Until he had a fateful encounter with another candidate.

“We were actually in line to do the drug test where you pee in a cup and all that,” Haywood remembers. “I was drawing up a design. And a guy said ‘Man, if you can draw and all that stuff, why are you doing all this with us? Having to pee in a cup, having to answer the board of education, hope you’re going to get hired? Why don’t you have your own shop?”

The question stuck with Haywood.

“Why don’t I have my own shop? I was apprenticed under a good tattoo artist who was apprenticed under a great tattoo artist, and there’s really something to that in tattooing,” he says.

So Haywood gave up on the school system. He found a former pharmacy in downtown Whitesburg, Kentucky and opened his own shop — The Parlor Room.

The Parlor Room sits in downtown Whitesburg, Kentucky.

*Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

That was 13 years ago. Haywood’s shop has since outgrown its original basement space and now occupies the whole first floor. The walls are covered with an overwhelming amount of art, even by tattoo shop standards.

“The lobby pretty much serves as an art gallery, just to vibe the place up,” he says. “Everybody tends to bring in a lot of the same-old same-old on the Internet. So we try to keep something to get their brains looking at some art or some traditional books and stuff like that.”

Some of the art is Haywood’s. The rest is done by his kids, his friends, his clients and the shop’s other artists. The Parlor Room now boasts five tattooers in all. Two of them are Haywood’s own apprentices.

Watch this special Inside Appalachia Folkways story below:

“You can go online and find someone explaining everything you want to know about this,” Haywood says. “But what you don’t get from that is the importance of learning how to connect with clientele, seeing what they may be going through when they come through the doors.”

The Parlor Room has its own unique way of connecting with clients. Hang around on a slow day and somebody will inevitably pick up one of the many musical instruments laying around the shop. Before long, they’re joined by someone else, thumping on a bass or strumming a guitar. If he doesn’t have a tattoo machine in his hand, Haywood will be right in the middle of this impromptu jam session, picking away on his open back banjo.

Fellow tattooer Russ Griswold thumps on his upright bass and John Haywood plays the banjo as frequent client Brad Centers listens.

*Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Those banjo stylings are the result of another important apprenticeship for Haywood. Around the time he was planning to move back from Louisville, he did an art show here in Whitesburg, selling some paintings.

“I was doing a lot of banjo-y paintings. Like, old timers playing the banjo. At some point I did an art show at Appalshop. George Gibson came by, saw the art show, bought a painting or two and left me with an album of his,” Haywood says.

Haywood had been aware of George Gibson for a while. They kept crossing paths at music festivals. He knew Gibson was both an accomplished banjo player and a historian of the instrument.

Gibson learned to play from his neighbors in Knott County, Kentucky, soaking up a regional traditional banjo style that had largely been forgotten as the instrument became more associated with commercial bluegrass music.

“He would learn a lot of stuff from people that didn’t even own instruments but could play a song or two,” Haywood says.

Gibson later moved to Philadelphia and then Florida, becoming a successful businessman. But his love of the banjo kept him coming back to Kentucky.

When he ran into Haywood at that art show, he saw something in the young artist. And offered him a deal. In exchange for one painting a year, Haywood could live in a house on Gibson’s Knott County property and study banjo with him.

“We never did too many lessons. A lesson would be him telling me these stories about people, or him encouraging me to read some kind of book. Or sometimes me sitting on the porch with him while he played,” Haywood says.

Through these informal lessons, Haywood began to absorb the banjo styles that Gibson had spent his life studying.

Haywood doesn’t just play his banjo between tattoos. He regularly plays gigs and festivals all over Kentucky and beyond. He appeared on Tyler Childers’ gospel album “Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven” and has recorded banjo albums of his own, including one taped right here at the Parlor Room.

While tattoos are usually associated with rock or hip hop music, Haywood sees a strong connection between his study of banjo and his study of tattooing.

“The practice of traditional tattooing is almost exactly like the practice of traditional music. There are designs that were done and executed in the past — say an eagle, done by someone like Sailor Jerry. As a traditional tattooer, when someone wants something like that, I go to that as a reference. I am executing a design that originated maybe over 100 years ago at this point,” Haywood says. “Those are the folk songs.”

A traditional pin up-style tattoo by Haywood on friend and client Brad Center’s forearm.

*Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Whether we’re talking about tattoos or banjo, Haywood is careful who he shares these hard-won lessons with.

“It’s ‘see me now, hear me later,’” Haywood says.

He once had a “sketchy neighbor” who got a tattoo machine from the Internet. The man stopped Haywood in the middle of the road to ask him how the device worked.

“I told him every single thing about it. You’re supposed to keep that secret,” Haywood said. “I told him everything about it, standing in the middle of the road. And said ‘Well, I’ll see you later. I’ve got to go to work.’”

He drove away, leaving the neighbor more confused than when he started.

“There was so much knowledge, he’s not going to understand any of that unless he goes the path of actually trying to figure that out,” Haywood says.

It’s the same thing with the banjo. The stakes are quite a bit lower — nobody’s getting permanently scarred from a bad rendition of “Cluck Old Hen.” But Haywood can’t pass down any of the knowledge he has gleaned from years of study without a willing student.

“It’s not going to even matter. It’s probably going to waste our time unless you’re ready for it,” he says.

Artists like Haywood dedicate years of study to their craft — learning history and technique so they can bring all that knowledge to bear when they’re standing on a stage or jabbing ink into someone’s bicep.

Yet the whole point of all that practice, study and work is to create art of such depth that the uninitiated can appreciate it without a lifetime of study. We don’t need all that knowledge in our heads or our hands, because we can just feel that it’s good.

That’s certainly true with music. Whether you’ve heard the song before or not, whether you know its history or not, when it’s good — you feel it.

Haywood says it’s the same way with tattoos.

“It’s funny what tattooing does for folks. When you put something on someone and they walk out of here, you see them feeling better about something,” Haywood says. “It feels pretty good to know you can do that for someone.”

——

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.

‘Don’t Get Dead,’ Tattoos And Cryptids, Inside Appalachia

This week on Inside Appalachia, it’s been five years since the COVID-19 lockdowns. An album made during that time is getting a re-release on vinyl. Also, a Kentucky tattoo artist practices traditional tattooing and traditional music. He says they’re not too different. And, what keeps people so fascinated with cryptids?

It’s been five years since the COVID-19 lockdowns. An album made during that time is getting a re-release on vinyl.

Also, a Kentucky tattoo artist practices traditional tattooing and traditional music. He says they’re not too different.

And, what keeps people so fascinated with cryptids?

You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.

In This Episode:

Don’t Get Dead: Pandemic Folk Songs By The Cornelius Eady Trio

Five years ago, the COVID-19 lockdowns kept a lot of people out of public spaces — and a lot of artists used that time to create. Like the Cornelius Eady Trio.

The group is organized around Cornelius Eady, a poet and professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, whose writing has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

With the help of musicians Lisa Liu and Charlie Rauh, Eady puts his words to music. The trio recorded an album of songs about the pandemic. It’s called Don’t Get Dead: Pandemic Folk Songs by the Cornelius Eady Trio.

The album now has been re-released on vinyl by Whitesburg, Kentucky’s June Appal Recordings.

Traditional Music And Tattoos At The Parlor Room

John Haywood of Whitesburg, Kentucky says he got his first guitar and his first tattoo when he was about 13 years old.

These days, Haywood is the proprietor of Parlor Room Art and Tattoo in downtown Whitesburg. It’s a place where some people get inked up, and some play traditional music.

It’s a place unlike any other, as Zack Harold reports.

Traditions: The Ghost of Ruth Ann and Other Local West Virginia Lore

The Veggie Man at the Folklife Center in Fairmont, West Virginia.

*Courtesy of the Mothboys*

Almost everyone has heard of the Mothman — West Virginia’s best known cryptid. But have you heard of Veggie Man?

That’s another West Virginia cryptid. And it helped inspire a zine project from the Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center at Fairmont State University.

Producer Bill Lynch spoke with the center’s director, Lydia Warren, about the forthcoming publication, which is taking submissions.

——

Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by The Cornelius Eady Trio, John Haywood, Tim and Dave Bing, Paul Loomis, John Inghram and John Blissard.

Bill Lynch is our producer. Abby Neff is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens. We had help this week from Folkways Editor Chris Julin.

You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.

You can find us on Instagram, Threads and X @InAppalachia. Or here on Facebook.

Inside Appalachia is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

After Devastating Floods, Appalshop Archival Recovery Makes Steady Progress

Appalshop, an Appalachian arts and media hub based in Kentucky, faced archival damage during a devastating flooding incident in 2022. Now, the organization says restoration efforts have brought much of the archive back to life.

When deadly flooding swept Eastern Kentucky in July 2022, it claimed the lives of 45 residents and devastated homes, roadways and infrastructure.

For Appalshop, a regional media and arts hub, the floods brought severe damage to its film and audio archive, which documents decades of Appalachian culture and folk life.

This month, another bout of severe flooding killed at least 23 people in Kentucky and three in West Virginia. Reporter Jack Walker spoke to Roger May, Appalshop’s director of artistic programs, about the recovery process thus far, plus the future of archival work as environmental disasters become a seemingly ever-present concern.

Listen to an extended version of this conversation below:

https://wvpublic.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/02xx-Archive-Recovery-WEB-Extended.mp3

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Walker: Can you tell us about what kind of archives Appalshop posts and its ties to Appalachia as a region and the regional heritage here?

May: Our archive is, we believe, the largest repository of Appalachian ephemera in the country and quite possibly the world. That includes film. That includes video, photo negatives, audio recordings and other types of ephemera. A lot of that material was damaged in the flood of July 2022, when the flood waters off of the North Fork of the Kentucky River reached about six-and-a-half feet in height inside our vault in the archive at our Whitesburg building.

It was a huge blow to not just our archive, but to the region and to the folks that know what’s in that archive and the richness that’s contained therein. But we’ve been able to get that material out to the respective subject matter experts in those fields. And we’ve been really pleasantly surprised with the results that we’ve seen from the cleaned and digitized material that we’re getting back.

Walker: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that, this February, both Kentucky and West Virginia have been affected by flooding, which has been fatal in certain communities. Given that we’re talking about flooding today and how it’s impacted your work, could you speak to what the situation is like over in Eastern Kentucky?

May: In 2022, it was deemed the 1,000-year flood. One that no one could recall seeing [another flood] as bad as it was. It was just devastating. Now, in February of 2025, we find ourselves in the midst of another 1,000-year flood in fewer than 1,000 days. So it seems like the frequency of these kinds of floods are increasing, and the impact of these floods are just horrific every time they may happen.

There have been a number of deaths in Eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia. And it’s just, it’s hard. We’re often labeled as resilient people, and there’s a point at which resilience is not a choice. It’s something you have to do. But it’s also tiring to have to be resilient all the time.

Walker: You mentioned that a lot of these materials were damaged during the 2022 flooding incident. What did the restoration process actually like? You said you found experts who were able to restore certain materials. Can you walk us through what it takes to restore archives?

May: Well, from from a lay perspective — again, I’m not an archivist or a restoration expert — but from my 30,000-foot understanding of it, as soon as those materials are exposed to water or humidity or mud or any of the elements that came through during the flood, they can begin to break down. So the first thing is to suspend that growth of mold and so forth. And you do that by getting it into a freezer or colder storage. So that’s step one.

Then the experts in the field have developed methodologies to carefully clean and restore those items. Then they have a digitization process that they go through. And once that’s completed, they send those films and audio recordings and footage and so forth back to us on hard drives. So that’s a little bit of what that process looks like.

Walker: Now that we’ve seen the impact that flooding can have on archival materials like this, are you taking any steps to prepare for incidents like that in the future?

May: One of the things that we had to do in 2022 was look for another space. We simply just couldn’t be in the building we were in in Whitesburg anymore. So we relocated to a temporary office space in Jenkins, which is about 15 miles away from Whitesburg, still in Letcher County. We’ve moved our materials over there. Also, our archive standard practices geographical separation. So we have multiple copies of hard drives backed up in geographically different locations. So, if something catastrophic like a flood were to happen again, we would have multiple copies of those materials at different locations.

Runoff flooded portions of U.S. Route 119 in Kanawha County, W.Va. earlier this month, causing traffic delays.

*Photo Credit: Eric Douglas/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Walker: I’m a little biased because I’m coming from a West Virginia perspective here. But maybe for our West Virginia listeners, are there any things that have stood out from the West Virginia materials you’ve collected?

May: Yeah, one that really stands out to me. Again, I’m biased too, because I was born in Pike County, Kentucky, and raised in Mingo County, West Virginia. So I usually joke and say I get to claim dual citizenship.

But as a West Virginian and as somebody from Chattaroy in Mingo County, Nimrod Workman, the regionally well-known activist and singer and performer is from Chattaroy. We have June Appal Recordings, our record label; the very first imprint on our record label is an album by Nimrod Workman and his daughter. There’s an Appalshop film about Nimrod Workman called “To Fit My Own Category.” Again, as a West Virginian and somebody from Mingo County, I’m really proud that those items are in our archive at Appalshop.

Walker: I was curious, then: Do you think archival work like this that focuses on the entire region of Appalachia plays a role in uniting communities here, and making them feel like they are part of a shared history?

May: I think it’s really important for people to be able to see themselves in the archive — that they see themselves represented and reflected back to themselves in our archive. That’s one of the amazing things about the archive at Appalshop. It counters the stereotype of Appalachia just being white and rural. We’ve got a really broad collection of materials, from Cherokee speakers to African American folks. As an archive, we want to continue to build on that and continue to show the diversity in Appalachia.

Walker: A word you used earlier in the conversation that I think really highlights what we’ve spoken about so far is ephemera. So, materials that aren’t necessarily long lasting. I’m curious, when you face an incident like this that really highlights how ephemeral, for lack of a better word, some of these archival materials that relate to Appalachian heritage really are, how does that change your motivation to protect these pieces of cultural heritage? Does it add a sense of urgency to the work that you’re already doing?

May: I think it does. In this time, everything feels urgent. I think it’s important that we remind ourselves of why we’re here in the first place. That is to help other people tell their stories and to center those stories in a landscape where their their voices and their stories are often not centered and not heard, and to celebrate the beauty in that, and to lift that up and to preserve it so that future generations can also see and learn the beauty and the value of it. Whether it’s a flood or another natural disaster, it’s important to preserve these materials.

To learn more about Appalshop, its archive and its arts programming in Appalachia, visit the organization’s website.

This story was distributed by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKYU in Kentucky and NPR.

Appalachian Program Feeds Families As The Pandemic Economy Places More In Need

It’s a sweltering hot Monday in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and the kitchen at Community Agricultural Nutritional Enterprises, or CANE, is buzzing with activity.

In an industrial kitchen that was once a high school cafeteria, Brandon Fleming is chopping onions and sliding them into a massive aluminum tray of beans. Once the beans are in the oven, Fleming mops his brow and heads outside to the parking lot, where a small army of teenagers is loading bags and boxes of groceries into the trunks of waiting cars.

“We have forecasted that tomorrow we will hand out our 100,000th meal,” Fleming said as he surveyed the scene.

It’s quite a feat to have accomplished in just three weeks, even more so when you consider that Letcher County, of which Whitesburg is the county seat, is home to just 21,500 people.

The county sits along the Kentucky-Virginia border, in the heart of Appalachian coal country. Since the Louisville and Nashville Railroad laid tracks into the region in 1912, trainfuls and later truckfuls of black gold were taken from these mountains, keeping the lights on across an industrializing America while coal country itself was left behind.

You might still see a coal miner in coal-smudged reflective work pants stopping by the Double Kwik for a cup of coffee, and you’ll still find “Friends of Coal” bumper stickers and long-idled coal tipples as you drive these winding roads. But Letcher County can’t be coal country much longer.

Will it rely on tourism next? Agriculture? Industry? No one knows for sure.

But now there’s a pandemic, and those existential questions have been sidelined, it seems, by a more urgent, more solvable problem: getting bread, milk and broccoli to kitchen tables when many are going without.

Growing Agriculture in Appalachia

Partly because of extraction, and partly because of the miles of mountain roads separating the region from anywhere else, Letcher County ranks among the lowest counties in the nation on measures like per-capita income, health conditions like diabetes and COPD, and unemployment.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment in Letcher County was at 12 percent, wellabove the national average. Now that number is likely about 20 percent.

About 30 percent of Letcher County children didn’t have adequate food, even before the pandemic hit; now, the nonprofit Feeding America has found that eastern Kentucky has some of the highest rates of food insecurity in the nation.

SFSP staff and volunteers prepare for residents to arrive.

The statistics are part of what inspired Valerie Horn in 2009 to begin a shared garden in the community of Cowan, as part of the Grow Appalachia program with nearby Berea College. She wanted to connect families in her community to fresh fruits and vegetables, but also to a history of agriculture that predates coal.

“Last year, Grow Appalachia harvested over 250,000 pounds of fresh produce,” Horn says. “At one point a few years back, I was talking to my brother, and I was really excited that we were over 50,000 pounds at the time. My brother is a very practical person, he knows how much work it is to get that much out of a garden. So he goes, ‘Harrumph. That’s as much as a coal truck.’ Since then, I have enjoyed that image, of a coal truck full of fresh produce.”

The CANE community kitchen emerged from the Grow Appalachia garden as a place for farmers to produce value-added goods like jams and pickles, and for people of all backgrounds to sit together and enjoy a free meal prepared with local foods.

Now it’s the staging ground for a massive operation getting free food to 2,400 children and 1,000 families, from McRoberts on one end of the county to Gordon, an hour away, on the other.

“Without really understanding how big this project was, we decided to do it, and to take that challenge,” Horn says.

The program is funded by the USDA’s Summer Food Service Program, which is designed to provide healthy meals to children in low-income families when school is out for the summer. In normal years, children gather in a central location to share a sit-down meal, but because of the pandemic, the USDA has permitted program sponsors instead to provide meal kits to eligible families.

“What a meal kit means is, it’s ingredients for breakfasts for seven days and lunches for seven days,” Horn says. “My understanding is that it lasts until the pandemic is over; my latest notice is that we’re good through August 31.”

Downtown Whitesburg, Kentucky as seen from the CANE Kitchen.

Delivering with Community Help

The program is a massive logistical lift for Horn, Fleming and a small crew of other leaders.

Many in Letcher County lack access to internet service, so some needy children don’t get registered, and some families have to be called to make sure they make their pickup. A fair share of Letcher County children live with grandparents or other family members, meaning elderly people who are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus are often the ones swinging through the pickup lines behind the CANE kitchen.

Transportation is another challenge. Horn throws up her hands, imagining the hassle of getting a baby, a toddler and a first-grader ready and into the car, then navigating miles of treacherous mountain roads to the county seat.

That’s why Horn has partnered with volunteer fire departments across the county, and it’s why a jovial man named Allen Cornett picks up 22 boxes of food from the Whitesburg community kitchen. He loads them into the back of an ambulance and drives them 30 minutes to the Gordon Volunteer Fire Department.

Everybody calls him Red Allen, or just Red.

“I used to be red-headed, but I’m not now,” Cornett says with a laugh, lifting a baseball cap to reveal long gray hair.

“Red Allen” Cornett supervises meal kit distribution at the Gordon Volunteer Fire Department.
Credit Sydney Boles / Ohio Valley ReSource

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Cornett is new to food distribution. He doesn’t really know what the CANE Kitchen is, or how this free food got there. But he and his wife spend the morning calling 22 families in the Gordon area to make sure they knew it was pick-up day.

“We’re volunteering to help out, do this for the summer months, plus I guess with this virus-19 going around, too,” Cornett says.

Horn says she knew that CANE would need to partner with people like Cornett and groups like the Gordon Volunteer Fire Department. Like many families around here, seven generations of Horn’s family have lived in the same holler, passing food from one front porch to the next.

Not too long ago, when Horn’s mother started going to the Whitesburg high school, she had only been to the county seat three times in her life. Now, Horn might make the same trip three times a day. But the cognitive distance remains.

“For her, in the holler that she grew up in, in Scuttle Hole Gap, coming to Whitesburg was a big deal, and there was a divide between the communities and the county seat of Whitesburg. So I would think that sometimes, families would just be more comfortable if it’s their neighbor that they know that is distributing the milk and the box of food.”

Local teens help out distributing free meal kits to low-income families.

Still, about half of the families registered for the program choose to pick up their groceries in Whitesburg, at the old city high school given new life as a community gathering place.

A declining population and school consolidation left this great hulking building empty; local agriculture, free concerts and farm-to-table food for anyone who wants it brought the building back to life.

“It’s like the Velveteen Rabbit,” Horn says. “Every time we use the space, it gets a little more real.”

This story was produced with America Amplified, a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. America Amplified is using community engagement to inform and strengthen local, regional and national journalism.

Anxiety In Appalachian Coal Country: First The Mines Closed, Then Came Coronavirus

As the economic fallout from the coronavirus continues to reshape our lives, small-town business owners are worried about the future. Whitesburg, Kentucky — a town already struggling from the decline in the coal industry — is grappling with a new and serious challenge as the effort to contain the disease brings deep economic pain.

The Appalachian Regional Commission still considers Letcher County, where Whitesburg is located, and many of the surrounding counties, “distressed” because of high unemployment, high poverty rates, and low per-capita income. Much of that distress came from a decline in coal jobs: There were fewer than 100 coal miners in Letcher County in 2017, down from 13,000 in 2009.

Despite the challenges, Whitesburg is a fabulous town. I know because I live there. It’s got lots of public art. There’s a great walking trail right along the river, a community kitchen, more live music than you could shake a stick at. And it’s full of people who are passionate about building a diverse and sustainable community, who have worked diligently for years to create a thriving downtown.

All of that is to say, Whitesburg is fragile. And the economic fallout from the coronavirus is likely to destabilize this place, and places like it, harder and faster than it might in larger cities.

In order to limit community spread of coronavirus, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear banned dine-in service at all Kentucky restaurants, effective 5 p.m. on Monday, March 16.

To see how the ban is going to impact local restaurants, I walked down the street to Heritage Kitchen, my go-to spot for lunch.

It was eerily quiet. Chairs were up on tables. Server Amber Bailey fixed herself a cup of coffee and we sat six feet apart to talk about what this meant for her.

“I’m one of the lucky ones,” Bailey said. “My boyfriend has a full-time job. But I have a lot of friends who work in the restaurant industry, you know, waitresses and bartenders, and they don’t have anybody else. So I’m more worried for them than I am for myself.”

Brad Shepherd owns Heritage. “Our primary business has always been the dine-in,” he said. “We’ve always done some take-out and delivery, but that’s all supplemental to the dine-in.”

Shepherd plans to stay open for take-out and delivery for one month and re-evaluate, but he’s worried if the crisis goes on longer than that, he’ll have to shut down. Even by the end of that month, he says, he’ll be dipping into his own savings to keep the restaurant afloat. Just like Amber Bailey, Shepherd isn’t just worried for himself.

“It really does take all of us to create a sense of a vibrant business atmosphere,” he said. “So losing any one of us permanently would be a devastating blow.”

Ripple Effects

“I don’t foresee every business making it through this,” said Alison Davis, Executive Director of the Community and Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky at the University of Kentucky. Her organization has helped rural coal-reliant communities transition away from fossil fuels, and prepare for crises like natural disasters. “When we’ve tried to prepare communities to be resilient after disasters, this is not the kind of disaster we’ve tried to prepare communities for,” Davis said.

Uncertainty remains regarding how or whether the coronavirus crisis will overwhelm hospitals, and what the economic fallout will be from extended forced closures of many American industries. But most projections look serious. A recent white paper from the MITRE Corp., a not-for-profit company that advises the federal government on national security matters, warned that the rapid rate of new cases in the U.S. could require 90 percent isolation of the public in order to stop the spread of the virus.

Still, Davis says, rural communities have real strengths they can build on right now. “It is the local people right now who are determining their chance of success post this disease,” she said. “I get excited because I know some of these communities, they have really rallied. It is, we have been together, we know each other, we know our strengths, we know our formal and informal leaders. We’re going to figure something out.”

Uncertain Future

Back at Heritage Kitchen, server Amber Bailey is already thinking about how to support her community. “If we end up shutting our doors here, then I can help some of my other friends who may have little ones where their daycares are gone.”

Projections show unemployment in rural Kentucky already skyrocketing, and it’s only going to get worse: According to the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, the Cabinet for Education and Workforce Development received about 23,600 unemployment claims in just three days, up from about 2,000 in a typical week.

Bailey still has hours. And she still knows exactly how I like my burger when I call to order takeout. But across the street, downtown pub Streetside has laid off its servers indefinitely.