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On this week's premiere broadcast of Mountain Stage, host Kathy Mattea welcomes The Steel Wheels, Sam Weber, Peter Holsapple, Lily Talmers, and Rylee Bapst Band to the Memorial Auditorium in Athens, OH.
EJ Henderson After The Flood And “Little Seed,” Inside Appalachia
Jayne Henderson builds her own future as a guitar and ukulele maker.Janie Witte
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After Helene, an Asheville guitar maker grapples with how to help her neighborhood when there’s so much need.
A church in West Virginia is helping turn unwanted guns into garden tools.
And, for writer Wei Tchou, it took leaving her home in East Tennessee to start seeing herself in a new way.
In This Episode
Catching Up With Luthier Jayne Henderson After The Flood
Gun And Garden
A Study Of Identity And Ferns In “Little Seed”
Catching Up With Luthier Jayne Henderson After The Flood
Elizabeth ‘Jayne’ Henderson in her workshop in Asheville, North Carolina before Hurricane Helene.
Credit: Janie Witte
Earlier this year, we visited the workshop of renowned guitar-maker Wayne Henderson, for a story about him and his daughter, Jayne Henderson.
Jayne lives in Asheville, North Carolina, and Wayne lives in Rugby, Virginia. Both places were wrecked by Hurricane Helene. Folkways reporter Margaret McLeod Leef caught up with Jayne in the days following the storm.
Gun And Garden
Outside the Shepherdstown Fire Department, Craig Snyder runs a firearm through a power tool, dismantling it. Photo Jack Walker.
Sometimes when people die, they leave behind guns, and their relatives don’t always know what to do with them. So a church in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle is providing a way to dispose of old firearms – and find new uses for them. WVPB’s Jack Walker reported.
A Study Of Identity And Ferns In “Little Seed”
Author Wei Tchou explores nature and personal identity in her book, “Little Seed.” Courtesy photo.
The book “Little Seed” by Wei Tchou (CHEW) is a hybrid of nature writing and memoir. Tchou’s parents migrated from China and raised her in eastern Tennessee. The book’s chapters alternate between stories of her passage into adulthood, and descriptions of ferns and closely related plants. Mason Adams spoke with Tchou several weeks before Hurricane Helene.
Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Amethyst Kiah, Wayne Henderson, Jane Kramer, Gerry Milnes, Steve Earle, John Blissard and Blue Dot Sessions.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens. You can find us on Instagram @InAppalachia.
You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
An Us & Them episode honored by the Virginias Associated Press Broadcasters for Best Podcast examines the hidden side of homeownership in Appalachia. While West Virginia has the nation’s highest homeownership rate, aging housing stock and low incomes leave many residents living in deteriorating conditions. Reporting from western Virginia, this episode explores what happens when owning a home doesn’t mean building wealth.
By some measures, West Virginia has the nation’s highest homeownership rate. However much of that housing is old and needs repair. Our latest episode of Us & Them is a recent award winner from the Virginia AP Broadcasters. Trey Kay uncovers an aspect of the housing crisis we don't often hear about – structures without electricity or running water that people call home.
Fluorspar is a little-known mineral used to make everything from steel, aluminum and gasoline to uranium fuel and batteries. For the Appalachia Mid-South Newsroom, WKMS’ Lily Burris reports the largest known deposit of the critical mineral in the U.S. is in western Kentucky – and its applications in artificial intelligence (AI) could reawaken the region’s mining industry.
The economy is everything we buy or sell and services we use. It can be a broad category and most of us struggle to understand what it all means. The show "Planet Money" from NPR dives into those topics and attempts to make sense of it. And now, the show has published a book called Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life. We speak with the author and one of the program's hosts.