A conversation with Jesse Barber

Transcript from episode fifteen of the Good Folk podcast.

Paying subscribers to Good Folk receive access to the full transcripts of the Good Folk Podcast. All subscribers can listen to the podcast here. If you would like to become a paying subscriber, you can do so here.

SPENCER GEORGE: Hello, everyone. My name is Spencer George, and you're listening to the Good Folk podcast. 

When you think of Appalachia, what comes to mind? Is it the stereotypical imagery of rolling hills and crumbling barns? Of mountain peaks and churches tucked back into the woods? Is it of lush forests and winding trails through which hikers traverse? Is it of coal mining and opioids? Of startling headlines and complicated politics, union histories and artist strongholds? 

Appalachia, as many of you who listen to this podcast will know, is many things. Most of all, for a lot of us, it is home. It is a place both beautiful and heartbreaking, both progressive and stuck in history. Folklore has contributed deeply to the myth of this region. As of journalists who have long flocked the mountains, looking for a glimpse of the real America, this country has spent decades scapegoating the region, casting it aside and leaving it behind. But in turn, those who call it home have come together to fight back and rewrite that story. 

I come from a family with long roots in the Appalachian foothills, and for me, it has always felt like home, though a claim to this place still holds on my tongue. There is nowhere I have loved more nor run away from so fast, a pattern that has tracked its way throughout my matrilineal line. All of us looking for better opportunity, better ways of life somewhere else. In many ways, all of us are still looking for that home.

Today's episode is about home and about the struggle to find it. It is about Appalachia and the stories that surround this region, how a few menial drawn up lines have come to define so much of this country and so many of our own identities within it. 

I'm thrilled to be joined in this conversation by Jesse Barber, a documentary photographer based in the Appalachian region region of North Carolina. His work focuses on the culture of rural communities and the influence of traditional values, such as those tied to labor and religion. Raised in the rural South, Barber has an understanding of the nuanced perspective in small communities, and he seeks to expand our understanding of how religion, labor and history intersect with the land today. 

Jesse articulates so many of the things I have long felt, and I'm just grateful our paths have crossed. His work has been featured in the Washington Post and Rolling Stone, among many other outlets, and has won countless awards. He sheds light on this place, not trying to make it something else, but simply showing it as it is, like Appalachia itself. It's beautiful. It's heartbreaking. It's home. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

SPENCER GEORGE: So I'll follow up with you with all of that after, but, yeah, let's just get into it if you're ready. Sounds good. Cool. So I definitely want to talk about your work and your photography and Appalachia, all the things, but I'm super excited to have you here. And I think the question I actually want to start with is, tell me something true about yourself.

JESSE BARBER: Something true. I'm a conflicted person. Got a lot of complex thoughts about my own work, Appalachia, representing it, trying to represent a small part of it. Is that good? 

SG: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I do feel conflicted, especially when I think about my relationship to home and to Appalachia and to the idea of being a creative person in that place. So that's a great transition, I think, into your work. Obviously I know about your work, but for anyone who doesn't, how would you describe what you do and your journey into it?

JB: Well, I guess I could start with where photography started. For me, I'd say its origin started with when I got out of high school. My longest, oldest friend, we met the summer before first grade and played baseball together. But we took a trip with his mom and his grandpa. It was my first time out west. And my mom had a little digital point and shoot camera from the early 2000s and wanted me to take pictures. So I, like, took thousands of photos of just everything. And she also gave me a journal to write in, and she wanted me to write in it every day and to bring it back home to her. Cause she'd never been out west. She'd only been to Kentucky, I think, to visit my grandpa's family. But she wanted me to bring back things to share— what did I see and everything. 

So I think that's an origin of what I still do now, weirdly enough. Just meeting people and having conversations with people, photographing people and then bringing it back. And to share it, I guess, is the main thing that I enjoy. There’s the making of the work, but I enjoy sharing what I'm doing or sharing what I've heard, sharing who I've met with other people. 

Photos by Jesse Barber.

SG: I like the way you describe that with kind of the communal piece being inherent to it. I feel like sometimes people will talk about visual work and it's meant to showcase, right, to shed light on something. And not as often when it comes to art, forms of visual art or writing or photography, is it really about the act of bringing it back and having other people be a part of that. And that's so beautiful the way you describe it, of wanting to have your mom be involved because she couldn't be there with you. We're going to get in, obviously, to the conversation about Appalachia, but especially with Appalachia, it's so much of wanting other people to see what we see and what we know this place to be, which when you look at the history of photography in the region is very often outsiders portraying that rather than people who really do get to see it up close. Could you tell us a little bit about how you got from that to where you are now with photography, and a little bit about the work that you've done thus far? Because your work is amazing. 

JB: Thank you. Yeah, it was after that I was at community college and took a class with a man named David Hessel. He was an old style photojournalist from film days and he had a very unique style of teaching photography. And that was my intro to it.

I worked at Habitat for Humanity, built houses, and I would photograph things going on at the houses or events, but I would also use the camera as, like, an escape to get out of my mom's house, the place I was born, to explore. A lot of the time it was exploring the mountains or hiking. So it became like an adventure. I got into the whole adventure photography kind of thing for a little while, and then things really shifted. I listened to audiobooks driving back and forth to work, and I listened to Hillbilly Elegy. I think somebody told me about it, to read it or whatever. I had no idea what was going on. 

SG: We all have an origin story with Hillbilly Elegy where somehow we've all encountered it, and I can't actually remember who it was who first told me to read it or recommended it. And I would like to have a conversation with them now. 

JB: Yeah. I had no idea what was going on. I didn't know what Appalachia was. Although I was in the region technically through government standards, talked the language, grew up in some of the traditions, I guess, but I didn't know what it was. But then that introduced me to the whole world, and I started getting into looking at Appalachia. I was like, this is amazing. I started photographing in, I guess, a more socially conscious way, like, conscious about myself and my family and where I was born into in relation to what was going on in the country.

But it also came at a time when I was wanting to move away from home, and move out into the world. So it became a process of myself, of processing myself, I guess, self reflection. 

SG: Did you feel that kind of as you got into the arts, there was this pressure to not be here? I know that that was something that I felt kind of having that realization of, oh, wow, the life that I've lived is what other people would describe as Appalachian. And having these roots and not even really realizing that, and then kind of also feeling that pressure of, if I'm going to do this, that's not possible to do here. Mostly for me, it just felt like there was so little representation. And of course, now you look back and there's so many amazing artists that are from this region and have done incredible things in this region. But that wasn't the narrative that I knew or understood, and I’ve found that's a pretty common pressure. I don't know if that's something you ever felt.

JB: I think the idea of being like… I just felt like I never had the ability to think that I could just move somewhere else to photograph. Like, that is a ridiculous thought to think of. Growing up, it was like the parameter of life, of how far you could imagine. I guess I could imagine great things. But the reality, my reality was, you were born here. You were staying in this little circle. Find a good job. 

So those were more pertinent themes in photography, just to enjoy your experience. But I feel like in my journey, it hasn't been until now where I've really started to look at the people who have left home or have left where they've grown up and seen how exponentially more opportunities you get in that experience. That's a thing to wrestle with, like, well, do you want to stay connected to the people you know here, or do you want more opportunity? And in the process, do you want to become disconnected? 

SG: I feel like I have this conversation with a lot of people about this sort of Appalachian exodus right, of so many young people who are leaving, especially now that people often have the opportunities to or feeling like they're going to have more opportunities somewhere else. And then at the same time, I had a friend who said to me, like, I don't want to be a stereotype of just another Appalachian who leaves. And then you have amazing organizations like The Stay Project and so many just places and spaces that are attempting to show that you can have those opportunities here. But there's still that disconnect when you're growing up of, is that actually possible for me? And we've kind of talked around it, but what is home to you? Where is that, and what does that look like? 

JB: Caldwell County, which is— I'm in Watauga County now, in Boone and heading east, you will arrive. If you head directly east, you'll arrive in Caldwell County. It's like, down the mountain, off the mountain, I guess. But yeah, I live there 28 years in various locations. My mother, she lived there. My grandfather and grandmother lived there. Great-grandfather and great-grandmother lived there. Great-great lived in Wilkes, which is the other next county over, or I guess above Caldwell County. But, yeah, it's just been a long time being here in the foothills. A lot of textile workers, furniture workers.

SG: I definitely want to talk about the idea of the foothills and Appalachia and the foothills’ relationship to Appalachia. We've talked about this, but my family is also from the foothills. We're up in Surry County, and it's hard to unpack my relationship to the mountains and then not being really in the mountains and in these kind of borders of Appalachia. But when you think about a home and what it looks like and how it feels, how would you describe your home or your relationship to it? I know that's a loaded question. 

JB: Yeah. Well, I want to return to the foothills as a periphery to the mountains, but… [laughs]

SG: We're going to get there. Don't worry. 

JB: Home is just a lot of… it's like a mixed bag of, partially commercial, partially…  I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like there's evidence of the past. Textile furniture boom everywhere you look in the places that I've lived. But it's like remnants of the past that are no longer a reality for a lot of people. 

SG: I feel like that's a great metaphor, kind of just for this whole region and the broader South in general. There's remnants of the past that a lot of people want to cling on to, but it's also a reality that ultimately isn't possible in the world we live in today. And there's this disconnect, I think, in so much of Appalachian and Southern Studies. It comes up a lot for students of Appalachian and Southern Studies. I just describe it to people sometimes as, like, there's two different Souths, and people live in completely different versions. Right. There's this version where there's the remnants of the past, and so many people still want to live in that, and then there's a totally different version, and there's just such a widening gap between them. 

I feel like a lot of my focus and photo work kind of lives in that blurred space of the history that people wish for and the reality of the modern world that we're in now and the disconnect and the friction between the two…We talk about the past continually in the present, and we continue to bring it up and live in it. 

JB: Yeah. I feel like a lot of my focus and photo work kind of lives in that blurred space of the history that people wish for and the reality of the modern world that we're in now and the disconnect and the friction between the two. Like, you think about my family and you would think that from the stories that my dad tells, that he just got out of high school. It's like he's still talking about his buddies in high school. My uncle talking about his hot rod cars. We talk about the past continually in the present, and we continue to bring it up and live in it. 

SG: As Faulkner says, the past is never dead. It's not even past. The seminal Southern Studies quote. But it is, it’s true. My family is very similar, the way we talk about things and it's hard to reckon with, but I do think your work does such a great job of kind of leaning into some of these representations— and I promise we are going to get back to the foothills because I definitely want to hear your thoughts on it— but leaning into these representations of what people might expect of the South and then countering that with what your lived experience here has been. We haven't mentioned it yet, but you are a student in Appalachian Studies and you're an amazing photographer and documentarian. You've been published in a variety of incredible outlets and just won some amazing awards, done a lot of really incredible work, and I think you do such a great job of kind of placing these two Souths up against each other, both in comparison and contrast. That's the word I'm looking for.

JB: Yeah. And I feel like a lot of it is something that I've dealt with myself. Like being in that same mindset. It's something that took me a while to figure out, cause I lived in it, the reminiscent past. And so a lot of my photo work, especially this summer in Kentucky with Boyd’s Station, I was trying to photograph those, like, physical manifestations of the past, but there wasn't anything there. Like, there used to be an old grocery store there, but there's nothing. It's just a grassy lot now. It's like, how do you try to visualize the past for us to reflect on it now and to reflect on where we are now in relation to that past? 

It’s a hard one, and that's come up a lot in my bigger photo work. It's probably been like a four or five year long process. I titled it “May the Lord Bless You and Keep You in Good Health”, after my dad had left a comment on something I posted on Facebook, and he left that, may the lord bless you and keep you in good health.  I was like, that's amazing. I'm going to use that, which is a bible verse, but… 

SG: I think the novel I'm working on now, like, a good majority of the key phrases came off of road signs or posters that I bought at flea markets. 

JB: [laughs] Nice.

SG: The slogan for the book is, only a god can make a tree, which to the right of me is a poster that says, only god can make a tree that I found at a flea market. And that's what's really inspiring to me, at least about this region, is it's home, but there's also so many things about my own relationship to it that there are these little visual clues to communicate where we are. That we're stuck in the past, but there's also this element of being able to imagine some sort of different future through this creative work that I think is so important to where we are right now, especially when you get into the rural South and Appalachia. But it's also really beautiful. 

And I totally agree with you. My work has been so much a personal journey of unpacking my own relationship to home through these different stories and things that I'm producing and trying to figure out, you know, where is my role within it. And I think now we can return back to the foothills, because that's something that I think about a lot of, who has a right to claim any kind of Appalachian identity? 

I know for me, when I first got into Appalachian Studies, I was like, yeah, my whole family's Appalachian, that's my identity now. And then the older I get, the more I think about that. I'm like, well, I might have been raised in a very Appalachian family who comes from there and has those roots, but I personally didn't grow up in Appalachia. So do I have a right to claim that? These days I lean towards no. Like, I could say I have roots, but it can't be necessarily my identity. 

Then when you get into these, like, borderlands of Appalachia, this is something that comes up a lot. You know, we have these drawn lines around this whole region, but what's to say that somebody on one side of the line has a different lived experience than somebody on the other just because one is Appalachian and one isn't? And how do you really define these borders? I would love all of your thoughts on this, and I know that's something you think about a lot in your own work. 

JB: I spent my summer photographing in Harrison county, Kentucky, with Boyd’s Station. And I looked on the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) map, and the ARC goes around that county for some weird reason. But the county is like, there's a lot of agriculture. There's a lot of people still farming, like, one lane roads, and it's like, well, this could be Appalachia. Why isn't this Appalachia? It’s a little far from the mountains, I guess. It's central Kentucky. 

I've talked to people up here in the mountains, and they'll be like, where are you from? And I'm like, Caldwell County. And they're like, oh, you're a flatlander. So yeah, I guess to them, I wouldn't be Appalachian. I feel like the Appalachian identity has been turned into a buzzword or, like, something popular for people to try to latch onto. 

SG: Oh, yeah, it's totally commodified because now it's like people can sell things based on the Appalachian identity. And especially in the world of folklore, this comes up a ton of you know, you have a lot of white Southerners who wish to absolve themselves of any guilt they might feel, and so they cling to an Appalachian identity rather than reckoning with what the South has historically been and has historically done. So many folklorists will come in, and instead of studying places in the South, they'll go to study Appalachia, because then they can oftentimes avoid having to really deal with histories of race relations and histories of slavery because they can say, well, I'm studying the mountains. And that didn't happen here. Which is why we have so many folklorists working in Appalachia and very few folklorists really working out towards the coast here in eastern North Carolina. We have a large concentration around the Triangle, but in terms of the Piedmont and the hills of the Piedmont itself, very little there as well. 

Everybody wants to go up to Appalachia, and I think the bigger question is, what makes something Appalachian, and how do we even go about defining that? Is it just undefinable? I don't know.

JB: We need a further separation. Like Foothills Studies or something.

SG: It's true! We do.

JB: It's its own little place because it's like, in the mountains, you had— well a lot of the narrative is that there were a lot of, like, subsistence farmers, but it’s a little more complex than that. And then in North Carolina specifically, you have like the Piedmont, where you had so many textile mills, but then you had the foothills, which is where there was good rivers for good clean water and ample spaces to build these self-sustaining mill factories that could be powered off the water. That created a little pocket of commercialization and industry. And it's like butting up against the mountains, the true mountain people. What you have is a lot of mountain people coming down off the mountain to work in these mills. You had the commercialism that was happening in the piedmont, and then the mountain lifestyle clashing in this little place where the mountains began. 

I feel like that continues today. I feel like it's like a mixed bag of where it's like, it’s not got a lot of commercial and industrial success, but there's a little bit. There was a lot of music festivals and fiddler conventions that happened in the foothills. There was a lot of culture that was happening in this area. 

SG: You're right, we do need foothills studies because it is a very interesting region. And that's the story of my family— my grandma left Surry County and came down to Winston Salem for work, but still basically raised my mother with her family up in Surry County as much as possible and in that kind of whole world. There are so many people that have a similar story of being raised in a tradition, even if you weren't raised in that place. And then these kind of borderlands become such a melting pot of different opportunities and different things and different traditions in a way that's really interesting.

It reminds me of how people reckon with Florida and Texas in Southern Studies of like, we don't quite know what to do with it. It is part of it, but it is also not part of it and it's kind of its own thing. We need a whole foothills concentration in Appalachian Studies. And you're a student of Appalachian Studies, so I'd love to hear a little bit more about your journey into that, which is, it’s kind of like folklore. A lot of people don't know, you can go and study these things, but you can go and study these things. [Laughs]

JB: I will say, I feel like a lot of us from the foothills are like children born of industry, born of this new industrial boom that happened in the South after the Civil War. So we're like physical manifestations of that. And all of the baggage and also the good things that came with it. The ideas on religion and the ideas on labor and politics definitely created, like, who we are, and now we're reckoning with it. We're like, well, I feel differently, I don’t want to work in a mill or a factory. I want to do something different. 

SG: And, like, the death of mills. I mean, so many mill towns now are just…  Like Durham. I live in Durham. This was a former mill town back in the day. Now, these are just, like, trendy loft apartments. I'm sitting here in a trendy loft apartment. Like, I'm in no position to talk. [Laughs]. But so many mill towns are defunct and then this kind of idea of, like, rural revitalization of then you have a lot of developers that want to come in and make these arts communities, which is good in theory and often plays out in not so great ways, which continue to contribute to a lot of the problems I think we're seeing. 

JB: Yeah. My journey, I guess, into Appalachian studies, I originally was in sustainable development. I wanted to learn about all of that so that I could better inform my photographs. But talking to my advisors, they were like, we think that you are in the wrong program. I was like, cool, I'll switch. [Laughs] What am I supposed to do with that information? I didn't know what I was doing, so I was like, these people know what they're doing, right? So I go with them. I switched to interdisciplinary studies, that's where I would make my own degree. And I ended up making a degree titled Documentary Studies in Appalachia. So I did, like, half intro to Appalachia courses, half documentary practice, both in photo and video. 

That was my entryway, I guess. Along that time, I was working for the university documentary film services here on campus, and I was running a camera for them. This is like the same second time that I had ever run a camcorder or whatever. But I understood visuals. It's the same practice. It's just moving visuals, right? 

SG: That's what I'm telling myself now that I'm taking documentary courses. I'm like, yeah, it's the same thing, right? 

JB: It's all the same in theory, shape, line, composition. There's a little bit of difference. Whereas in photos you want some free space, but in documentary you want.. like, you want cool stuff. But anyway, I was helping a grad student with South Arts work, and I made a little video from one of the field work visits interviewing a molasses maker. And they were like, this is great. You're going to be the next South Arts graduate worker. And I was like, okay. 

Throughout the rest of my undergraduate work, I worked with South Arts to do fieldwork, and then now here I am, two and a half years later or something, still doing fieldwork for them in my master’s program. And that's been a huge, huge piece to keeping me here and keeping me engaged is doing a lot of that. Theory is great, but practice and meeting people and being engaged with stories, that's the real stuff that matters, I think, to me. 

SG: Have you felt when you go into communities, and especially rural southern communities, to do field work on behalf of an institution— I know coming from Chapel Hill, especially if you're doing work in the mountains, there is a large distrust of the institution, because it's like, why do you have all these resources and all this funding, and now y’all want to come to the mountains? Is that something that you have felt, kind of this distrust of the academic world? Or how do you negotiate and navigate your position as somebody who's working with the university but also has deep ties to the places that you're working in? 

JB: Yeah, I feel like Chapel Hill has a different reputation than App—

SG: You can rag on Chapel Hill here, it's okay. [Laughs}

JB: As the state's premium premium unleaded education, built on plantation money and all that kind of stuff. App State, I feel like… I mean, App State is a bit of.. How do you put this— a bit of a problem for the Boone community, as in, like, the issues that students have, housing and jobs and all this kind of stuff. There's just too much. there's not enough space for everyone. 

I feel like when I'm doing field work, it's weird. I don't know. I never really thought about this, but I don't have a filter of, you know, Appalachian culture, and I am a representative of Appalachian State University. I think of myself as my own representative. Like, me, Jesse Barber, is there to meet with this person to hear their story. 

I haven't really had much friction with me being part of this institution. I mean, a lot of people don't even know what South Arts is. And a lot of people that I interview are people that are on South Arts lists that are grant awardees. Quite a few of them are well established artists, and they need monetary help to build something or build a studio or fix their house or buy supplies. So it's a lot of different things.

SG: Are those people that you're then coming in and doing documentary work with on behalf of South Arts, or what's your field work process like? As a field worker, I'm always just interested in other people's processes. 

JB: Yeah. So South Arts gives me four people each semester. It's like, we need you to interview these people, and then I have to fill in the rest. I do seven in total. So you get three other people that you need to identify and reach out to. Those are the more difficult ones to try to poke around, be like, well, does this person fit under the category of folk art? Which is kind of frustrating.

SG: Oh, we could have a whole conversation about the category of folk art. I run into this a lot in folklore traditions. Storytelling, obviously, big deal. However, everybody loves oral storytelling, and there's very little room for traditional narrative. I don't even want to call it traditional because my advisor once said a lot of the work that I'm doing is folklore futurisms and looking at, like, what do we do with fandom objects and handmade Harry Potter wands being sold on Etsy. But really what I'm most interested in is always written storytelling, and there's not a lot of room for that. It's not a traditional folk art. You might have things like, if I'm going to sit up here with a banjo and tell you a story, then, yeah, that's a traditional folk art. But if I'm going to write it down and just give it to somebody in, like, a booklet, maybe if the act of making the book itself, if I'm hand binding it and I'm making my own paper, then it's a folk art. But there's so many antiquated categories in these fields of study. You’re right. The definition of folk art is something we should probably change. 

JB: Yeah. And the idea is like, well, did they learn it from their parents? It's like, no, but they did watch a YouTube video. Does that count? 

SG: And then that gets complicated again. When you talk about what we were talking about, this kind of exodus and migration of people. If you learn it from your grandparents, but you don't grow up in that area or that tradition, can you still count it as folk art? Or maybe you grew up in Appalachia, you're someone who moved to Appalachia as a child but doesn't have the traditions there, but then you're learning it on YouTube. 

JB: Yeah. I can't remember when this was maybe 2021. I got on Reddit and I was like, let me see if I can find some random person floating out here. So I looked at the Reddit, the subreddit of Appalachia. It's pretty interesting. There's all these people like, oh, I would love to know what that's like. There's people, like, living in Washington State that are engaging with Appalachian culture, and it's like, how do we bring that into the fold of the conversation where, yeah, we're just living in a wildly different world, and no place is like a sacred safe haven. 

It's like everything is accessible at this point, and boundaries are becoming… I don't know, it just seems like boundaries are becoming less important because it's like someone who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, can be like, I'm Appalachian because my grandparents live there or something. I've thought about my own identity of Appalachian. It's like, does it really matter? I don't know. I don't know if it really matters. 

SG: I agree with you. 

JB: Which I used to be like, no! 

SG: I am a person rooted in this identity. 

JB: I am a person from this specific place y’all don't know. And then I'm like, well, it's not doing any good. It's like I'm gonna bury myself in a hole, and no one wants to talk to that person. 

Photos by Jesse Barber.

SG: I think if you're doing meaningful work and engaging meaningfully with the community that you're in and that you identify with, it doesn't really matter in the end. And it's interesting what you bring up. I was digging in the archives, looking at some different magazines of Appalachia the other day, and I found this one that was talking about— I don't even know if it's still around— but a store that once existed in midtown Manhattan that was, like, an Appalachian wares and goods store. All these people in Manhattan could go and buy their Appalachian craft goods. 

And then I think about my entry point into Southern studies, and Appalachian Studies also being Hillbilly Elegy, and it was really when I was taking memoir classes and writing about my family, and everybody said, well, this is like a better Hillbilly Elegy. And at the time, you're like, I guess that's a good thing. Like, Hillbilly Elegy is so popular, and then you actually start engaging in it, and you're like, that is not at all a compliment. [Laughs]. 

But just thinking about stereotypes and representations and what the Internet has done, would you say, in your work as a documentarian, do you think it's made it better or worse in terms of these stereotypes, that now people can kind of engage with this identity and this culture from anywhere? 

JB: Yeah. I feel like it’s just a further extension of the surface level understanding of people and place that, like, tourism and the folk art industry has created. Kind of an extension of that. It's like buying a fretless banjo, now I'm engaging in Appalachian culture. There's so many like— I don't have TikTok, never have— but I am curious, and people have shared videos with me, but I'm sure there's just so much Appalachian videos that are happening on there. 

SG: Oh, there’s so many. I recently got on TikTok and became bombarded with it. And one of the most fascinating things to me is there's this big trend on TikTok especially, where people talk about, you know, don't go out alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains late at night, and all of these different legends and stories. So much of my work is in legends and stories, and I'm like, well, I grew up spending every summer with my family in the Blue Ridge, and I spent many nights alone in the woods. I've never heard this. 

But then you almost start to second guess yourself, because then it's like, if so many people are talking about this, am I just missing out? Then you also have a lot of people who actually are from Appalachia who are like, I don't know what y’all are talking about. But this has been, like, everywhere. It's all over TikTok. And it's wild to me, of where did this come from? 

As someone who works so much in myths and legends and narratives and how myths of the styles get passed down, I find it a fascinating example of transmission. suddenly I have my friends in Ireland and Australia texting me, being like, what's happening?

JB: [Laughs]

SG: Isn’t this where you're from? Like, what's happening here at night? And me just wondering, how did we get there? The way in which these stories get passed down, I think, speaks really broadly for the region as a whole, of nobody really knows where these things come from, and yet somehow a lot of us buy into them in so many different ways, whether it's a good story or a bad story. I don't know about this one on TikTok.

JB: I guess the closest thing is, like, snipe hunting. You know about that? 

SG: No. 

JB: No? You don't know snipe hunting? [Laughs]. Yeah, it's like a trick that you do with people that, you know, it's late at night, you're all hanging out, and you're like you all want to go snipe hunting, and there's someone who doesn't know what that is, and you're like, well, it’s a bird that runs around on the ground, and you have to take a trash bag with a stick and beat all on the inside of the bag and make some kind of hooting and hollering out in the field. You leave that person out doing that, and it's kind of a trick you play on people. 

SG: I'm amazed this hasn't been played on me before, because it seems like I'm a prime target. 

JB: Yeah.

SG: Now I'll know. Thank you for the tip. 

JB: Yeah. Don't go snipe hunting. Make other people go snipe hunting. 

SG: If you learn nothing else from this podcast, that's what you learn. Don't go snipe hunting. 

JB: But there's all those stories of the people in the Blue Ridge whatever, and there's flat footing. There's, like, banjo playing, all these manifestations. And, you know, being here in Boone and App Studies, it's like, whoa, there's this whole world of all this folk kind of culture. But I have not taken any folklore classes or read any of the folklore classics, where if there are lists, I don't know of them. 

SG: There are. You could probably avoid most of them, I think. 

JB: I'm pretty sure someone else told me the exact same thing who went through a folklore program. They were like, you're fine if you don't read them. But I was at the American Folklore Society meeting in Tulsa this past fall and just engaging with all those other types of folklore, like, gaming and memes.

Photo by Jesse Barber.

SG: Folklore futurisms! It’s my whole thing.

JB: And how folklore plays out in some of, like, the Oklahoma blues and all that. I think it really, like, shattered the whole Appalachian folklore exceptionalism for me, because I didn't know anything else. I think that was a big eye opener for me to be like, there are so many amazing little ways that folk traditions play out in people's lives every day, anywhere. It could happen in this small corner in Brooklyn or something. There's so many great ways to experience folk culture in America or in the world, really. 

I just feel like the ways in which it presents itself in Appalachia are very obvious, and they're very commercialized and commodified, I guess, more easily. 

SG: Would you say that has contributed to kind of the outsider perception of Appalachia, which is often interested but not positive, at least in my experience?

JB: Yeah, it's like they don't have to think deeply about it. They just— you know, it could be anyone with a pair of overalls on or something and it's like, whoa, who is the Appalachian person? And then the people here are like, oh, this is so frustrating because they don’t represent me or us. And that happens a lot. 

It feels like you see, like, an article. I've had someone send me articles, a guy that I know, I don't want to name any names. I'm sure he'd be fine, but… He's from Tennessee. He had sent me an article that was wrote in 2016, and it was in his county. And the journalists did a terrible job representing his hometown, his people, and talking about Trump country, obviously. 

SG: I was going to say, 2016. I can take a guess as to what that's about.

JB: But it's like that happens so many times. You see a news article or something and you're like, oh my gosh, you're kidding me. And there's just, like— not that I'm an expert in knowing the right talking points or knowing all of the issues to talk about that need to be addressed. There's a lot of them. But I just feel like the true heart of the people who live here, the narrative isn't centered  on that. It's like a superficial level and misses the true story, the true narrative. 

SG: I think people are able to focus on that as a way almost to circumvent deep engagement with some of the real problems that we're up against both in Appalachia and in the South. And I want to talk about your work with this, because so much of your work is focused on labor and climate, which I haven't worked as much in labor, but I have worked a lot in climate, especially on the coast. And I find that a lot of journalism that comes out about these places tends to lean so heavily into the politics and the stereotypes that we're not actually talking about some of the real issues that people really are dealing with every day. 

I think your work does a good job of engaging with those, and I hope to see more artists continue to do that. But could you tell us a little bit about both labor and climate, which are two things you've engaged in your work and how you've brought them in and why they feel important to you? 

JB: I just feel like in some of the readings that have been doing recently for classes, it's just such a complex discussion to be had that I don't know if it can be facilitated by an outside organization. It needs to happen here, with these people, and then that story can be shared outside the region with people that need to engage with it.