Beth Durham's Blog, page 35

A Century of Memories: Willie Livesay Ward

Willie Ward

This weekend I had the rare blessing of attending a 100th birthday party and I thought I would share this precious lady with all of you.

Willie Livesay Ward was born January 2, 1916 to a family of eight children living just north of Monterey, Tennessee. Their father worked on swine farms in the area and Willie remembers him and the other local men herding hogs up the mountain to Monterey to be loaded on the railroad.

They would soon move to Fentress County and Willie would eventual...

2015 in Review

Well I hope that everyone had a merry and blessed Christmas. It was a little damp on Christmas Day in Tennessee but we were thankful for a dry home and all of my family was able to safely meet and celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Now we look toward starting a new year and I thought I’d share some thoughts about 2015. Last January, I shared some goals here; there can be no purpose in goals if you don’t ever look back to assess your progress, so here goes.

I have long rea...

Mountain Music

I’ve been sharing some of what I’m learning from Raine’s The Land of Saddle Bags and he includes a small section on Mountain Songs. I was particularly interested in this section for acouple of reasons. I’m a fan of Bluegrass Music and I’ve had the occasion to argue the point that while Bill Monroe may be nicknamed “The Father of Bluegrass Music”, the music is actually as old as the hills – or at least as old as our occupation of these hills. I am also interested because despite my very, ver...

Mountain Speech – per James Watt Raine

James Watt Raine as pictured in The Land of Saddle-bags.
The brown spots are simple worn off the page of this very old book.

A handful of you told me you would be interested in Mr. Raine’s thoughts on Mountain Speech and Song and I’m happy to oblige. So we’ll star this article with a confession – I sure got my comeuppance preparing to write this.

I thought I had a working command of proper English even though I often choose the more comfortable, mountain vernacular. Could be, I was mistaken f...

Old Time Virtues – From The Land of Saddle-Bags

A few weeks ago I told you I had a great ‘new’ book. I may have mentioned how excited I was when I first began to read something written by one of us. I need to reiterate that sentiment today.

Chapter four of The Land of Saddle-Bags is entitled “Elizabethan Virtues”. Now, I doubt anyone on the mountain today would pick up a book by that title and we surely wouldn’t label anything about our way of life “Elizabethan”. Yet James Watt Raine might well have been in one of our back yards as he wrote...

Family, Religion and Politics

We mountain folk are a bit clannish and proud of it. I’ve recently been learning about our Scots-Irish heritage and our ancestors seem to have passed their devotion to clan along through the generations. Family means a lot to us and it is largely the center of society on the mountain. While there’s always been the occasional ‘black sheep’ that didn’t seem to fit the rest of the herd, we are usually quite alike across the family and usually across several generations.

This leads me to ponder w...

Feasting and Fasting

Happy Thanksgiving!

As we celebrate what we often believe is a uniquely American holiday, I had not thought to write about it until Sunday’s sermon moved me. You know me to be a Christian Fiction author but this blog is not especially evangelical. That is due largely to my lack of expertise – there are lots of people writing with far more authority than I could offer. Today I write more from inspiration than education and I hope that I can cause you to pause for just a moment to give thanks...

Daniel Boone’s Wanderings

I have a great new book to share with all of you and I’ll be doing so periodically over the next few weeks (as I manage to read it through). The Land of Saddle-Bags (1924, Richmond, VA: Presbyterian Committee of Publication) was written by Berea College Professor James Watt Raine. I’ve read many books about the Appalachian people in the early twentieth century and I’ve complained about most of them. When I started reading this book, it brought tears to my eyes for I felt that finally here w...

Say Thank You to a Vet

I am posting this article earlier than usual because I wanted to be sure to be on time for Veteran’s Day. This is a holiday we need to pause to recognize those brave men and women who have fought for our nation; they deserve our attention for at least one day each year. However, I found myself struggling to find the words; I started the article two or three times but couldn’t get it just right. Then, as I was baking a rather pitiful Happy Birthday cake for a very appreciative Marine (the USM...

Final Stop on The Tour of The Upper Cumberlands

We’ve spent twelve weeks touring the Upper Cumberlands through 1940’s spectacles and from the perspective of Dr. Willis Baxter Boyd in his promotional booklet The March of Progress in the Upper Cumberlands of Tennessee. Today I’d like to wrap up the tour with stops in three towns and three additional topics.

McMinnville, TN

If we drove this route today, it would be about fifty-seven miles up highway 56 and we would not pass any other towns on the tour. But these three stops seem logical to g...