Follow the Foxfire: mountain travels
Let’s say you want to tour the Blue Ridge or Smoky Mountains. You are interested in knowing more about the old mountain people and their culture, their historical sites, and their old fashioned ways of looking at the world. In essence, you want to take a tour of what some have stereotyped as “hillbilly culture” but you don’t want to just go as a tourist seeking out Hollywood’s version of the people - often depicted like Lil’ Abner, Daisy Mae, and the characters from the Robert Mitchum film “Thunder Road”. You don’t want to see the Billy Bob Thornton film about Appalachia or read the book “Cold Mountain”, even. You want to dive into it in a much more intimate and personal way, as you wander through the backroads of little mountain towns. Where do you go for reading material to help you prepare for your trip in a holistic way? Try the Foxfire Books.
The Foxfire Books are the result of a project that was started in the 1970s by a schoolteacher in rural Appalachia. He wanted to get his high school students interested in the old culture, even as it was threatened with extinction. So he had them start a school paper, based on interviews with older people about the way they used to do things - the old mountain culture, music, food, agriculture, folklore, and medicine. Soon the interviews blossomed into one book, then two, and before long there was an entire series of Foxfire Books, which have been reprinted many times since. Everything you could want to learn about authentic mountain culture is included in these fine books, as spoken by the Appalachian old timers themselves.