ISBN: 0813101484 9780813101484

Category: History / United States / State & Local / General

Page count: 328

For the first time in 25 years, a general nonfiction book has been written about the hillbillies of eastern Kentucky. Altogether the hillbillies have to be documented to be believed. Some of them still go up in the mountains and throw rattlesnakes around in primitive religious ceremonies. Footwashings, baptisms in mountain streams, revivalist meetings abound in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Sometimes a dead man is buried a year late, and his widow, mourning mightily, brings her new husband along to enjoy the wake. Feuds still rage in Kentucky, and mountaineers are jailed for moonshining, while the Government tries to provide for the dozens of children of the deceased or imprisoned. Mine operators and miners work in violent hostility in the coal deposits of Harlan County. Reformers struggle to educate and frontier nurses on horseback perform heroic service in treating the sick and needy. Most of the people live in excessive squalor and poverty.