This week, a new memoir explores the struggle to stay in Appalachia and the struggle to leave. Also, an exhibit in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, documents the contributions of the Catawba Nation to the American Revolutionary War. And, grab some sunscreen as we make a visit to the Nelsonville Music Festival in Ohio.
Stephan Said played fiddle with Kurdish musicians at a refugee camp in GreeceCourtesy of Stephan Said
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Stephan Said takes his fiddle and guitar to refugee camps and war zones. He’s on a quest to make music that speaks across boundaries.
He’s been to battle-torn cities in Iraq, refugee camps in the Mediterranean and to ravaged Houston after Hurricane Harvey. When he gets to these places, he sits down with local folks to play music and help the healing begin.
Stephan lives in New York, but he traces some of his musical roots to his boyhood in Appalachia. The Village Voice and Billboard Magazine have compared him to Woody Guthrie because he uses his music to bridge divides between people.
Stephan hosts a video docu-series called “Borderless,” which follows him on his travels areas of conflict, from Greece, to Iraq, to Charlottesville, Virginia.
He talked with Trey Kay about his life as a musical ambassador.
Stephan Said’s “We the People” from Charlottesville in 2018
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On this West Virginia Week, we learn about steps parents can take to keep their children safe from harm, we look at a program to attract remote workers to the state, and a new Appalachian memoir.
This week, a new memoir explores the struggle to stay in Appalachia and the struggle to leave. Also, an exhibit in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, documents the contributions of the Catawba Nation to the American Revolutionary War. And, grab some sunscreen as we make a visit to the Nelsonville Music Festival in Ohio.
Writer Emilee Hackney has a complicated relationship with where she grew up. She loved her friends, family, the swimming holes and wild places in Tazewell County, Virginia, but she felt stifled. Her new memoir, All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir, explores this tension and what happened when she did leave.
A recent national story identified West Virginia’s Ascend program as being highly successful, even though the numbers are relatively small. News Director Eric Douglas caught up with NPR reporter Scott Neuman to discuss the program in relation to other similar efforts and what he discovered.