Echoes of Appalachia

There’s a version of Appalachia you’ve seen on postcards and documentaries—the “poor but proud” caricature with bluegrass on the breeze and old folks rocking on porches. That version is a lie, or at best, a half-truth. The real Appalachia is harder, deeper, wilder. It’s a place full of contradictions that don’t resolve cleanly into slogans. It’s where you’ll find radical hospitality next to hardened suspicion, where church sermons hit like punk shows, and where America’s myths run straight into its consequences.

Ask anyone who’s really from the hills, and they’ll tell you: Appalachia is not a monolith. It stretches from southern New York to northern Mississippi, cutting through thirteen states, but its cultural heart beats in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, western North Carolina, and parts of Tennessee. That’s coal country. That’s holler country. That’s where generations have lived and died working the seams of the earth.

The first lie outsiders tell about Appalachia is that it’s ignorant. That’s the national shorthand—”hillbillies,” “inbreds,” the butt of jokes by people who wouldn’t last a week on a ridge without cell service. But ignorance doesn’t look like someone who didn’t go to college. Ignorance looks like the think tanker who talks about “uplifting” Appalachia without ever having spent a night in a trailer with roaches and a hole in the floor. It looks like the foundation that funds a literacy program but ignores the strip mine that’s poisoning the town’s only water source.

Appalachians know they’re being watched. They’ve been studied like insects since the 1960s, when Lyndon B. Johnson declared a War on Poverty from the front porch of a Kentucky shack. That porch is still famous; the poverty is still there. Turns out, poverty doesn’t end with a photo op. It mutates. Coal left, and with it went pensions, jobs, dignity. What’s left? A thousand versions of the same story: Walmart, opioids, Dollar General, meth labs, and preachers promising deliverance from a God that doesn’t always seem to listen.

But don’t pity Appalachia. That’s the second mistake.

Because for every boarded-up downtown, there’s a family raising hell and kids and chickens on the same land their grandparents owned. For every overdose, there’s a recovery group meeting in a church basement, passing the hat and telling the truth. For every politician who came through kissing babies and left nothing behind, there’s a community organizer patching together something that works—a harm reduction van, a homegrown newspaper, a soup kitchen that serves hot meals with no strings.

Appalachia is not a place without resistance. It is a place of resistance. Go back far enough and you’ll find the coal wars—the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed uprising in American labor history. Miners shot at hired guns with stolen rifles and homemade bombs. They wore red bandanas, the original “rednecks,” demanding a fair shake from companies that saw them as disposable. You think resistance is new? Appalachia invented it.

And then there’s religion, and here’s where things get complicated. Faith in Appalachia is not soft-focus, stained glass stuff. It’s blood, fire, and prophecy. It’s snake-handlers and foot-washers. It’s holy rollers and doom-preachers. And for all its excesses and scars, faith is one of the only things in this region that has truly built community. It’s the church that pays your light bill when you’re down. It’s the old lady who bakes cornbread for your cousin’s funeral even though she hasn’t spoken to your family in ten years.

But faith can also be a bludgeon. It’s been used to chase queer kids into the closet or out of town. To tell women to keep silent and submissive. To condemn the very people Jesus would’ve dined with. And yet, those same queer kids often still love the gospel music. They still know the scriptures by heart. That’s Appalachia, too. You can’t box it in. You can’t sanitize it for your nonprofit grant application.

What makes it all harder is that most of the country only notices Appalachia when it can use it. Media outlets trot it out when they need a morality play—Trump’s win in 2016, for example, was endlessly pinned on “angry white Appalachia,” as if Black and brown folks weren’t also part of this region. As if 80% of the counties that flipped red hadn’t already been abandoned long ago by both parties. The coal miners were useful until the coal ran out. Now they’re a punchline. The opioid crisis didn’t matter until it spread to suburban white kids.

If you’re from here, the feeling you live with is betrayal. Not drama—fact. Betrayed by the coal companies that poisoned the streams and then left. Betrayed by the government that took everything and returned little. Betrayed by media that either romanticize or ridicule, never understand.

But the reason people stay—or come back—isn’t because they’re trapped. It’s because they love this place. They love the land: the woods that feel sacred, the kind of quiet you can hear in your bones, the smell of honeysuckle and woodsmoke. They love the people: rough-talking, sharp-humored, stubborn as sin. Love in Appalachia isn’t sentimental—it’s earned. You prove it by showing up, hauling wood, sharing tomatoes, helping someone dig a new well when the last one went dry.

Love here is practical. It’s painful. It’s political. It’s not polite, but it’s fierce.

So no, don’t come to Appalachia looking for a “simpler time.” Don’t come looking for redemption or ruin. Come to listen. Come with respect. Come knowing this place owes you nothing. And maybe then, if you’re lucky, it’ll offer you something rare: the kind of honesty that burns and heals all at once.

Because that’s Appalachia.

And it remembers everything.

-Tim Carmichael