Tales of the Cumberlands: A Story-Telling Conference -August 23–26, 2018
An Interview with Stephen Conley and Roderick Mullins
A special Story-Telling Conference featuring storytelling, — both fact and legend, and a visit to a historic Virginia town, will be held August 23–26, 2018 at The Breaks Interstate Park, Kentucky/Virginia. The stories, drawn from the first families of Eastern Kentucky and Virginia, will focus on tales from the Virginia-Kentucky border region from frontier days to the early 20th century.
We interviewed Stephen Conley, Event Producer and Roderick Mullins, Director of the Conference to learn more details of this unique gathering of kinfolk, genealogists, historians, authors, educators, actors, poets, and musicians.
What is the central idea of the conference?
Appalachia has a story that has yet to be told to the rest of the world. For so long, the people of Appalachia have been both misunderstood and misrepresented. When it comes to the mountains and its people, the traditional way of communicating is through story-telling. Focusing on tales and shared stories is one important way we can demonstrate to the world the rich, diverse history of our Appalachian culture.
For colonial America of 250 years ago, Appalachia was the first real frontier, and “going west” meant leaving the civilized colonies for the “dark wilderness” that was the Central Appalachia of Southwest Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and East Tennessee. Thousands of English, Scotch-Irish and German immigrants sought freedom and land that they did not have in Europe. These first families, who settled here (after driving away our native brothers and sisters from their lands) included the Johnson, Adams, Boone, Bates, Caudill, Combs, Craft, Flemings, Mullins, Potters, Wrights and many more.
These stories need to be presented and preserved for the grandchildren and other direct descendants of these first families.
Why have a conference on story-telling? Why is it important?
We believe that telling stories is intimately linked to what it means to being human. Some specialists theorize that humans are the only species animal who can create and share stories. We communicate and think in stories, so our stories make us exceptional, and, our Appalachia culture is rich in stories…
We want to bring the Appalachian past into the present with a celebration of our unique cultural heritage. The conference joins together, historians, actors, novelists and other narrators who convey multiple perspectives of mountain history and traditions. The four-day program is an unusual mixture of family lore, scholarly research and artistic performances.
If you are interested in the Central Appalachian region dating from Native Americans and Daniel Boone, through and after the Civil War; the numerous feuds that made our region famous; and the rise of the coal industry, then you should join us for this extraordinary weekend.
What is the history of your event?
We are pleased by the growing interest in our event, which began in 2013 in Wise County, VA. After a hiatus, the second convention was moved to The Breaks Interstate Park in 2016 and in 2017. We are now pleased to present this year’s program.
The older folks who can tell the stories of our region are dying off. Their children and grandchildren realize this and are interested in family lore. With this precious resource disappearing, it’s so important to get the oral history reported.
Our program deals with both facts and legends… and we try to sort these out with a dialogue between historians and direct descendants during the conference.
Historians and genealogists provide the facts, based on events that have occurred over the past 250 years. We combine these facts with special memories as told by direct descendants of those families involved.
The outcome of this exchange is a fascinating mixture of the drama and struggles of early Eastern Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee pioneers. The discussion provides context for understanding our place in Appalachia today and a rationale for celebrating our special cultural heritage.
I understand that you have incorporated music as an unusual part of the program.
Mountain Music has been part of our benefit efforts for 5 years. This year we offer varied types of it from hymns of the Old Regular Baptist Church to Union organizing, as well as the high and lonesome bluegrass sound of the innovative brothers, Ralph and Carter Stanley, who hail from Dickenson County. This year we have a special focus on the role of music and its importance in our cultural heritage.
Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is always present… from weddings to funerals and everyday life.
Learning to listen to the spirit that moves inside of us is a very critical part of our historic culture. Music was an integral part of the fabric of everyday Appalachian life in the past and remains essential today.
Understanding why we like music and what draws us to it is an opening into the essence of our human nature and may, in fact, be the universal language of mankind. Our music and song originate from a variety of sources and we care very much about our fiddles, banjos, dulcimers, mandolins and guitars. Indeed,
Music and song are found in the heart and soul of Appalachian people.
We have several different methods to explore this topic. For example, we feature a special event on understanding Appalachian music. We are honored to have our cousin, Sarah Bates, a documentarian and musicologist, and Lorraine Dechter, a CBS/NBC/PBS producer to give us a lesson in Mountain Music Strings: Songs of Appalachia.
Another approach is shared by our cousin, Jack Wright and Music of Coal: Mining Songs of the Appalachian Coalfields, a highly praised Folk Music Grammy nominated album that he produced sampling the musical history of coal mining. His one-hour presentation will feature his performance of many of the intriguing songs he featured on the recording.
Storytellers come in all sizes and styles. Some includes instrumentation and other traditional music tells stories with only the unaccompanied human voice. Some of the oldest religious stories were sung acapella.
Our third perspective centers on the hymns and gospel music found in the churches of Appalachia. We are honored to interview and listen to the Reverend Frank Newsome of the Little David Old Regular Baptist Church in Dickenson County (VA) as we explore Gospel Singing in the Mountains of Appalachia.
Newsome sings and preaches in the timeless tradition of the Old Regular Baptist Church. His songs will be drawn from his album, Gone Away with a Friend. Our cousin, Ira J. Bates will interview Reverend Newsome and discuss selected hymns and their significance to his church.
A fourth approach provides live Music of the Mountains featuring performances by Strawberry Jam and Pierceton Hobbs. These artists are local to Virginia and will share their own music.
What are some special features of the conference?
Strong cultures of storytelling possess two have two characteristics: a mindset of gratitude for the value of stories and an ability to create and share them. While the ability to create stories is a crucial skill-set that can be learned, the key is appreciation of the mindset. The importance of storytelling must permeate throughout the culture as an significant value.
Libby Tipton is a Master Story-Teller from the Appalachian Tradition. She shares her thoughts in The Importance of Story-Telling to Appalachia Culture. Dubbed the “Mountain Terp Teller,” Libby Tipton is a professional sign language interpreter from Flag Pond, TN. Having deaf parents, she was always a natural communicating other people’s stories through her hands. From Jack Tales to fairy tales and intense interpretations of Appalachian tragedies and mountain characters, Libby speaks to audiences of all ages and interests. She has long worked the Jonesborough (TN) Storytelling Guild. She now tells her own stories about Appalachian family life.
To develop the set of skills necessary to collect and tell their own family’s stories, we offer two workshops for participants to learn from experienced professionals. Sarah Beth Hopton provides a Writing your Family History Workshop, while Roderick Mullins demonstrates how to use multi-media in Recording History with Electronic Media.
Part of the conference involves the history of Europeans’ interaction with Native Americans. Can you explain why these topics are important?
Yes, we are very interested in learning about the earliest settlers of Appalachia and the continent. We imagine our home region when Europeans met the natives and what humanity was like even before the whites arrived. Native Americans where here perhaps 5,000–10,000 years before the Europeans came to drive them from their homelands. We explore this topic from several different perspectives. This year’s program expands its subject matter to include talks about Native Americans and other ethnic groups in the mountains.
History tells us several native tribes used Central Appalachia as a fertile hunting ground. We learned last year from Yuchi Chief Lee Vest of the elaborate salt trading via our various regional rivers they conducted with other tribes, local pioneers, and other traders.
Randall Osborne reaches much further back to the importance of salt in the region, which was a vital preservative for meat. He traces the development of gunpowder and the importance of lead bullets to the hunting of bountiful buffalo that lived there. He plans to celebrate the differences in buffalo hunting of natives in comparison to the early white settlers. Osborne will also introduce us to Chief Benge, a celebrated, but minimally known, red headed Cherokee in his session titled: Brine, Bullets, Buffalo and Benge.
For the first time the emerging Trader Tales being developed by Sarah Bates and Lorraine Dechter, will be highlighted. They will describe some women who excelled in early trading ventures in their talk: The “Trader Tales”: Digging Deep into The Bates-Wright Connections This theme will be re-visited in future conferences as more Historical details are uncovered. Sarah says,
I am a lifelong lover of mythology and stories told. Chasing my family ancestry has led to a deep dig on Bates family stories, aiming to sort myth from reality in the remarkable events our Bates ancestors experience.
The arrival of humans from Eurasia or Africa has intrigued archaeologists, anthropologists and lay historians for years. Recent digs in southeastern Virginia at Cactus Hill have found evidence humans living on the Nottoway River a thousand years earlier than the previous theories of Clovis culture settlements in New Mexico. This information runs counter to long held theories of migration via a Bering Strait land bridge through Alaska and points south. Now, the researchers have begun to posit transit by boat across the Atlantic. While Jamestown and similar European settlements in the early 1607 remains intriguing, tracing the first Virginians or Appalachians from 1605 backwards 16,000 years is fascinating. Most everyone wants to know where we came from.
Dr. James Glanville is one of the first historians to examine journals of Spanish explorer DeSoto and his men. He worked with translations of their written exploits to identify the areas they explored and their hostile incursions upon several native tribes. His theory is also shaking historical status-quo. Glanville said,
If I have a claim to fame, it’s that I said publicly that this is an important story for Virginia. It’s actually a huge story for Virginia!
He found evidence that Spanish Conquistadors were near Saltville, VA in 1540. He identified a large massacre of Native Americans by DeSoto’s troops in 1570.
In his session: The Conquistadors of Saltville and Appalachia, he will share his approach to history and the more exciting discoveries of the Spanish presence in Appalachian Lee County, VA, 70 years before the English settled in Jamestown.
Tell us about how Devils, Feudists, and Ghosts connected to the conference? What are these about?
The first families of the Appalachian region crossed Pine Mountain for work, farms, settlements, and they built villages. It was little matter which state one resided, except for the legal authorities and governor’s office.
After the Civil War, several former southern generals became Ky governors. These political leaders were known to the lawmen, bounty hunters, and enforcement officers of the region. We want to shine some sunlight on this part of our history to better understand today’s politics.
For example, during the Wright/Jones feud after the Civil War, Devil John Wright and Clabe Jones simultaneously had warrants for the other’s arrest, signed by the same Kentucky governor.
The use of “Devil” or “Bad” is intended as a sign of respect in the culture and means one should take care in dealing with such identified men. The feuds that continued the Civil war with mountaineers trained, first-hand in combat battle techniques kept the Cumberland Plateau region violent and in ways, lawless, pitted clan against clan for at least a generation beyond 1865. Again, we want to discuss and understand our past by studying the era.
This year features several major dramatic events that affected all Eastern Kentucky and Virginia. Specifically, we report on The Intriguing Life of Doc Taylor, who was captured and hung as an accused killer. Marshall B. Taylor, known as “The Red Fox” was a trained physician, follower of the mystic Swedenborg, and a U.S. Marshal in the 19th century. Taylor was hung in Wise, Virginia, in 1893, having been convicted of the murder of the Ira Mullins family. Featured is Oakley Dean Baldwin, descendant of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who has new information about “the Red Fox” and his Civil War experience.
In Clintwood, VA In the mid 1920’s, a shootout took place between a Virginia Prohibition Agent and the Dickenson County Sheriff over the sheriff’s “protection” of certain moon-shining activities of county residents and the law’s interest in those operations. Oakley Dean Baldwin tells us about the Carnage in Clintwood, from his book, where it all came to a blazing conclusion in front of the county courthouse. It was later reported as a family feud between two families — the Flemings and the Mullins.
Also featured is The Colorful Life of “Brandy Jack” Mullins of Bold Camp, VA. He was an infamous mountain character known of silver counterfeiting, moonshining and odd deeds. He travelled to Clay County, KY to his silver mine. His coins had more pure silver than real US coins, which is how officials caught him. Roderick Mullins, educator, historian and direct descendant of “Brandy Jack” Mullins will share tales about “Brandy Jack’s” life.
One of the most famous legendary figures of Eastern Kentucky was “Devil John” Wright, (aka “Bad John”) who served as US Marshal during the Hatfield -McCoy feud in Pike County and West Virginia, the Eversole-French Feud in Perry County, the Baker -White Feud in Clay-Leslie Counties and numerous other smaller yet violent episodes, including a bank robbery by the Frank and Jesse James gang in Huntington, WV.
“Devil John” was a “shootist,” demonstrating his accuracy with a pistol from horseback. “Devil John” got his name from his reputation of always “getting his man,” who ended up either captured or dead.
The latest incarnation of John Westley Wright is Thomas Wright, great grandson of Devil John. He is a WWII and Korean War veteran and retired Kentucky State Policeman. In Meet the Latest “Devil John”, Lawman of Eastern Kentucky, Tom Wright shares his experiences as a law officer with Richard Crowe, author, historian and storyteller.
The borders of Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee represented significant opportunities for illegal activities between states, and, for law enforcement authorities, major challenges.
Austin Bradley, Superintendent, Breaks Interstate Park tells us of his law enforcement experiences in the Interstate Park. In his Stories of The Breaks, he describes how the natural terrain and isolation of The Breaks of the Pine Mountain shape illegal activities and attracts unusual characters.
The stories you have mentioned are unusual… but what about the Ghosts?
Our oral tradition greatly reveres storytelling and ghost stories…, wild rare creatures found in the hills, and “granny witches,” who cast spells and use native herbs to treat the ill, are common themes. Participants are in for a treat if they want to hear about witches, hell-hounds, lost lovers and Appalachian revenge. We have featured three master raconteurs and authors who share their tales.
Stories from a Coal Camp -Katie Meade tells us stories of life as lived in a remote coal camp in Open Fork VA. She describes Jacob Blair, a Native American who served as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War, fighting in over 100 battles and who lost a brother. He was known as the last Indian of Dickenson County. She also introduces us to the stories of the “Witch of Coal Camp”.
Luke Bauserman, shares stories about A Ghostly Howl: Hell-hounds, Black Dogs, and Canine Spirits of the Appalachian Mountains. He presents three eerie tales of four-legged revenants, and how they inspired the creation of the Appalachian hell-hound found in his novel, Some Dark Holler. He also plays banjo with his stuffed possum.
Sharyn McCrumb is an award-winning Southern writer, best known for her Appalachian “Ballad” novels, set in the North Carolina/Tennessee mountains, including the New York Times Best Sellers: The Ballad of Tom Dooley; She Walks These Hills; and The Rosewood Casket.
She says, “I find that the more I write, the more fascinated I become with the idea of the land as an intricate element in the lives of the mountain people, and of the past as prologue for any contemporary narrative. This connection to the land is personal as well as thematic.”
Sharyn McCrumb shares stories from her latest books and reminds us of the importance of place and the value of story-telling.
My books are like Appalachian quilts,” says Sharyn McCrumb. “I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South.
Does the fact that you are holding the conference at The Breaks Interstate Park bordering Kentucky and Virginia have any special significance?
The Breaks, often called the Grand Canyon of the South, is a remarkably beautiful spot in nature. Folks from the region speak reverently, sometimes mystically of the Park. It forms a natural break in the Pine Mountain, the rooftop of the Appalachians, which runs 125 miles through Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia and joins the Smokey Mountains to the South in Tennessee and North Carolina.
This region was important historically and remains so today. Native Americans could conduct raids in Virginia, slip through the Breaks, and raft or canoe down the Russell Fork and the Levisa Fork to the Big Sandy River and be at the Ohio River in 4–5 days. Daniel Boone explored it as the northern end of Pine Mountain during his first venture into Kentucky in 1767 where he wintered on the Big Sandy River. He later settled on crossing into Kentucky 125 miles south at the Cumberland Gap.
For our descendants, the land was originally owned (in part) by the Potter family. The site, bordering on both Virginia and Kentucky, has seen hunting, fishing, and illegal moonshining, as well as marijuana production. Over the years, many of our relatives, including Devil John Wright, the “Red Fox” and many mountain characters have spent time at the Breaks.
I know that you have also planned a post-conference tour. What does this tour include?
On Sunday, August 26, we have planned a special event with a tour of historic sites.
Our post conference tour will travel out of the Breaks make its first stop at the county seat of Dickenson County, Clintwood, Virginia. It was there in the mid 1920’s, a shootout took place between a Virginia Prohibition Agent and the county’s sheriff over the sheriff’s “protection” of certain moonshining activities of county residents and the law’s interest in those operations. It all came to a blazing conclusion in front of the county courthouse and later was reported that it was a family feud between to families; the Flemings and the Mullins’s. Oakley Dean Baldwin will set the stage for this event in his presentation, “Carnage in Clintwood”, based upon his book of the same name.
We’ll then walk down the street and tour the Ralph Stanley Museum, and learn the history of The Stanley Brothers, find out more about Carter and Ralph, as well as the music that sets the Stanley Brothers apart from others as unique bluegrass artists and traditional musicians.
The highlight of the tour will be in Wise, VA at UVA-Wise. Through the efforts of Professor Brian McKnight, we will view the artwork of Fred Carter, a Duffield, VA native who called Dickenson County home for many years as a business owner.
He found his creative ability later in life in sculpting, painting and carving out scenes of Appalachia. The results are both haunting and beautiful. There will be lots of things to talk about with the Fred Carter exhibit at the new library gallery on the campus of UVA-Wise.
Conference Information
The Breaks Interstate Park is located between Haysi, VA, and Elkhorn City, KY, and is within driving distance of Pikeville, KY, and McDowell County, WV. The event runs from 4 p.m. on Thursday, August 23, through 5 p.m. on Saturday, August 25. The Clintwood, VA area tour is planned for Sunday, August 26, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
How much does the conference cost?
The event is open to the public, and admission is free. A donation of $25 per couple or $15 per individual is suggested for the Dickenson County, VA, Food Bank.
Last year’s storytelling convention, which focused on the exploits of local lawman “Devil John” Wright, raised $1,500 for the Wise County, VA, Food Bank .
Remember to call the Breaks reservation desk directly for the discount on lodge rooms, cabins or camping. Call the Breaks reservations desk directly (276) 865–4413 for the 10% discount on lodge rooms, cabins or camping.
Did you enjoy reading this article? If so, “clap” for us at the bottom of the page. You can also recommend the story to a friend or follow us on Medium.com.
If you are kinfolk, or think you are, join us on Collecting Cousins: The Kentucky River Giant on Facebook.
If you come to the conference, stop by and say hello, Cuz. As founding families of Eastern KY , VA and TN, many of your relatives will be there.
