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I hope you enjoy this fourth installment of Appalachians in Moving Pictures. My initial hope was to fit all the actors, featured and honorable, in this post. However, the information on these actors far exceeded my expectations. So, I have decided to include a Part IV-B for honorable mentions thatContinue Reading

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Welcome to the third installment in the series “Appalachians in Moving Pictures,” a post about silent film actors born in Appalachia. The first and second parts focused only on actresses, while the third and fourth sections are designated for actors. You’ll notice Part III and Part IV are a littleContinue Reading

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Welcome to the second part of “Appalachians in Moving Pictures.” This endeavor is a four-part series in our “Resurrecting Forgotten Artists” section. The first and second, as you have seen, are devoted to silent film actresses who were born in Appalachia. I chose the term, actress, because the denotation wasContinue Reading

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I love classic movies. Absolutely love them. They hold some kind of spell over me – a longing, perhaps, for grace or glamour or social etiquette or fashion. I mean, who wouldn’t want to watch a stunning Grace Kelly in Rear Window or gander at a suave Cary Grant inContinue Reading

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I just wanted to send well wishes to everyone during this health crisis. These are certainly extraordinary times. As a nation, we are forced to slow down when we’re so used to going, going, going, moving, moving, moving. Some of us have rarely, if ever, slowed down and the conceptContinue Reading

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In: Interviews, Nonfiction, Our Better Angels, Video & Film, Way Back When
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At the tail end of Black History Month in 2020, Appalachia Bare would like to introduce you to an exciting historical preservation project in the Appalachian community.   Black in Appalachia is a community service and documentary series project aiming to exhibit and preserve the histories of African American communitiesContinue Reading

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Betty Brewer was my great-aunt, though only four days older than my mother. I never knew Betty. She died before I was born, killed by a jealous wife who caught her husband and Betty in a lover’s tryst at a boarding house rented by the day. Family spoke of BettyContinue Reading

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**Featured Image: Barbara Allen’s Cruelty by H. M. Brock (Cropped) My maternal great-grandmother, Cora (McNeely) Goins, lived a good deal of her adult life in a coal camp, just down the road from Kentucky, in Westbourne, Tennessee. As the coal boom slowed and the company’s profits waned, the coal baronsContinue Reading

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A person cannot live in Appalachia or the South without experiencing “hillbilly music,” replaced in 1949 as “country music.” The familiar sonority, accompanied by a melodic, twangy dialect, echoes and reverberates across hills and hollers, flat lands and swamps. It surrounds just about every facet of the region and canContinue Reading

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  My father passed away from cancer July 19, 2014. When he was almost completely bedridden, he and I listened to an audio interview of an old family friend. My father broke down and said, “Just think of all the stories I could tell but never will.” I vowed rightContinue Reading