Recorded in the mountains of Kentucky. This Bull Elk was a brute! He wasn’t afraid and watched us as much as we watched him. He was the king there.

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Black Mountain was produced by Appalshop’s Community Media Initiative in 1998 in response to a group of Harlan Co. Kentucky residents who were organizing against a mountaintop removal permit for the tallest mountain in the state. The video was screened across the state in homes, churches, and college campuses. Produced by Greg Howard, Tom Hansell, and Nick Szuberla. For more information about Appalshop visit www.appalshop.org

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Kentucky Mist

Image by Universal Pops (mostly inactive)
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The mist rising like smoke from the mountains of Kentucky–the photo was taken in Letcher County, Kentucky, just over the Virginia line in Pound Gap.

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Image by arwcheek
Carl Theodore Michel’s school in the mountains of Kentucky

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When speaking of the greatness of Kentucky writing I often hear people say, “must be something in the water!” I don’t think so. I think it’s in great part due to the mountains that rise and stretch out all around our homes and farms. Our greatness as writers has to do with the land. Our connection to it. A wonderful old man in South Carolina once told me this wonderful thing, “God ain’t making no more land.” He was right. He was trying to tell me to remember what was important in this life. We don’t really own the land. The land owns us. Mountains that have been with us here in Kentucky for a million years. We never credit the mountains enough for helping shape who we are, for giving us a specific lens through which to see the world, a lens to nurture what we have to say about our human presence in it. We never credit the mountains enough. We think that they are tough and resilient and can take care of themselves but more and more we know that is not true. We have to be better caretakers of this landscape that is so particular to our sensibilities. We act as if the mountains will always be there — surrounding, protecting, helping to situate our contemplative nature, and yet we know it just takes a little dynamite and greed to change all that. The history of Kentucky writing has been what it has been because the mountains that inhabit so much our our particular skyline have long been our favorite horizon; that wondrous place where our eyes land and lift.

via » What else Nikky Finney had to say about mountains The Bluegrass and Beyond.

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This is an early traditional fiddle tune from Kentucky named for a gap in the Cumberland Mountains, played here on clawhammer banjo and rhythm guitar.
Video Rating: 5 / 5

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Image by nursing pins
From www.rubylane.com/shop/nursingpins

Mary Breckinridge rode through the mountains in the summer of 1928, visiting lonely cabins and riding up steep mountain canyons. She gave nursing care to men, women, and especially children. Word spread that she was a nurse and mothers flocked to her with their sick babies.

For the next 40 years, Mary Breckinridge served the Kentucky mountain people as a nurse, midwife and friend. She had seen and fallen in love with a stretch of land facing the great North Mountain, on the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River a few miles from Hyden. She bought the land and had a log cabin built there which she named Wendover. For many years, Wendover had two of the only five bathtubs in the county. She recruited nurse-midwives from England to come over and work with her.

Frontier Nursing Service today www.frontiernursing.org/

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South from Hell-fer-Sartin, a short creek flowing into the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River, lies one of the of the most isolated regions in Kentucky. There, on the north slope of the Pine Mountain range in Leslie and Perry counties — probably the last stronghold of white, English-language folk tales in North America — Leonard W. Roberts recorded this rich collection more than three decades ago. To a people who at that time watched dancing hearth fires more often than television, the adventures of Jack in the land of witches and giants, monsters and beautiful princesses, provided first-class entertainment. Here are such old favorites as “Sleeping Beauty” and “The Golden Arm,” retold in the idiom of the Kentucky mountains. Here are hauntingly beautiful cantes fables and earthy Irishman jokes. Here are encounters with Indians and marvelous hunting escapades. Roberts introduces his collection, first published in 1955, with a sympathetic description of the mountain way of life. He notes especially the bewildering and rapid changes that came to the Pine Mountain watershed in that decade as the highways and electric lines at last brought in a sophistication that preferred the soap opera to the folk tale. Although the stories Roberts recorded were still a firm part of folk tradition at the time, he believed that within a decade or two they would be forgotten — a prediction, sadly, by now no doubt fulfilled. Any lover of the vanishing art of tale telling will relish this rich treasury of folklore and humor. Full notes on sources, types, motifs, parallels, and possible origins of the tales make this collection valuable also for folklorists.

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• Photo Reprint
• Printed at 12 x 12 in.
• 1940 Aug.

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Black Mountain

Image by cindy47452
With the heavy rain we had the night we stayed in Perry County, Kentucky, there were thousands of these little streams pouring large amounts of water. The water comes from the top of the mountains and runs all the way to the road. I love the black color of the mountains down there.

Wet Mountain

Image by cindy47452
With the heavy rain we had the night we stayed in Perry County, Kentucky, there were thousands of these little streams pouring large amounts of water. The water comes from the top of the mountains and runs all the way to the road.

Black Mountain

Image by cindy47452
One of the lovely rock formations that make up the mountains in eastern Kentucky. They are a lovely black color.

Kentucky Mountain

Image by cindy47452
One of the beautiful mountains in eastern Kentucky. They’re so rocky, the trees don’t cover them all.

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Image by cindy47452
One of the lovely rock formations that make up the mountains in eastern Kentucky. They are

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