Back to Archive: 10/09/03. |
|
|
|
Ruralite Cafe: Published 10/09/03By Lisa Majors-Duff - News Editor'Mountain Talk' meant to speak volumes |
|
| "It's like we're singing, not talking," said Delmas Crisp.
"I guess you'd call it hillbilly-style," said Popcorn Sutton. Both were describing the way they communicate with others in the newly-released "Mountain Talk" video, part of the North Carolina Language and Life Project series. Sylva storyteller Gary Carden, the video's narrator, dropped off a copy of the documentary last week and asked that I have a look at the hour-long tape. Since the Cafe's VCR is on the blink, I took the video home, popped some corn and piled in on the couch, prepared to be entertained and educated. In addition to Carden, "Mountain Talk" director Neal Hutcheson cast an impressive list of characters, all native Southern Appalachian speakers, to star in his documentary and asked one thing of them: Be yourself. No one disappoints. "It was important to me to let the people represent themselves. And they did," Hutcheson told me. "Whatever is good about 'Mountain Talk' comes from the people in it." For instance, when Bertie Berlson talked about the years she spent away from her mountain home in Washington, D.C., she says flat out, "I'd just as soon be in hell with my back broke as live there." Appalachian native Kyle Edwards explained the uniqueness of mountain speech like this: "We are 20 years behind the whole country, but I won't swap places with nobody. I feel much more comfortable here being 20 years behind everybody than I would sitting a lot of places." "To outsiders, the mountain dialect may sound quaint, uneducated or worse," Carden says early in the film. Hutcheson uses his film to explain that once settled in these mountains in the second half of the 1700s, Scot-Irish immigrants were isolated from the rest of the world for hundreds of years. "Asheville was like a foreign country," said Ernest Woods. "And places like Atlanta and Chattanooga you just didn't go." Cut off from mainstream English speakers, mountain folks' speech patterns evolved in isolation, while older words and expressions remained. Hutcheson pulled in local "language experts," including Highlands poet Jonathan Williams, who appears in the film to be particularly taken with the expression "they lord," and Karl Nicholas, my Western Carolina University English professor who points to what I always considered to be one of the most friendly of expressions, "You'uns come go with us." "It has always struck me as strange," Nicholas said of this expression, "but it seems a real genteel thing to say." One of the reasons Hutcheson made "Mountain Talk," he said, is to present Appalachian people in a better light than they'd been portrayed in years past. He has Gary say that "the outside world knew little or nothing about mountain people and judged them to be without culture. The negative stereotype has become well known and widespread, and to the mainstream English culture, strange-sounding mountain talk confirms this misconception." Hutcheson gives the viewer a handful of examples of "strange sounding mountain talk" like these: "Si-gogglin" – not lined up correctly, as in a poorly constructed building or a curvy road. "Plumb" – added to a sentence to express an extreme, as in "the copper vein went plumb over the county line." "Airish" – chilly, breezy. "Dope" – a sody water. "Boomer" – a red squirrel. "Scald" – dead land that won't grow anything. "Gaum" – in a mess, like "all gaummed up." "Poke" – a paper bag. "Younder" and "yander," it seems, mean the same thing, just with two different pronunciations. From county to county mountain people will use expressions that mean something only to them, Gary said. "That's one of the delights of mountain culture." One of the more insightful lines, one I often hear around the Cafe, came from one of the documentary's stars after providing the definitions of several mountain terms without hesitation. "They didn't know they was talking to such educated folks," said Orville Hicks. "'Mountain Talk' is really about the intelligence, humor and diversity of the mountain people," Hutcheson said. "I wanted to give a raw impression of mountain life through music, images and the casual conversation of the people who live there." Music, most of which is provided by Mary Jane Queen and her son, Henry, plays a large part in this film. "Paper and Pens," "Cripple Creek" and "Snowbird Mountain" are just a few of the mountain tunes presented here, complete with traditional mountain cloggers strutting their stuff. "Mountain people worked hard and lived far apart," Gary said in the film. "When they had a chance to get together, it was a social event." As the documentary reaches its end, Hutcheson touches on the reasons for preserving mountain talk and culture on film. Electricity, televisions, telephones and improved roads have all done their share of eroding the isolation of the mountains. "If we loose our heritage, how do we know who we are?" Bertie Berlson asked. "I think it's important to know who we are and where we come from." As projects like Neal Hutcheson's "Mountain Talk" go forward, the generations to follow will have a valuable resource once Granny has gone on to her great reward. |
Back to Archive: 10/09/03. |
|
|