Review: Jesse Donaldson on Foxfire’s Appalachia

Revisiting our post on the political uses of nostalgia

Stacy Kranitz, Letart, West Virginia, 2015. From As it was Give(n) to Me, a ten-year archive of collected images, text, and objects that traces exploration and extraction in central Appalachia, published in book form by Twin Palms Publisher. Earlier this year Stacy Kranitz collaborated with ProPublica on a photographic essay on how Tennessee’s abortion ban has affected one family. She describes the project as “an editorial experiment that merges immersive and intimate documentary photography with investigative journalism” and applauds ProPublica for “believing in the value of this kind of complex multi-dimensional storytelling” and giving such stories the “time, care, and sensitivity” they deserve.

In 1966, a high school English class in Rabun County, Georgia, launched Foxfire, a quarterly magazine dedicated to collecting local folklore. Six years later they compiled selected pieces into a bestselling book. And in the years since, a steady stream of Foxfire installments has catalogued life in Southern Appalachia, with a particular gaze on traditional practices.

The most recent variant, Travels with Foxfire, offers lessons on herbal medicine, water divining, gospel singing, and moonshining, among other things. In many ways it is not much different from Foxfire I, which promised to teach readers about hog dressing, log cabin building, mountain crafts, faith healing, and moonshining. Because certain traditions never get old.

The series is an important anthropological record of an idiosyncratic but loosely defined part of the world. Collectively, it offers over four thousand pages of interviews—a mother lode of material that rounds out a story of Appalachia beyond the deeds and misdeeds of power brokers and the ruins they leave behind.

The most recent Foxfire installment includes interviews with Mary Frazier Long, America’s only “privioligist,” Dori Sanders, who developed a recipe for Okra Parmigiana for her “yankee” friends, and Emory Jones, a humorist who tried to change the Georgia state bird to the chicken by asking the rather (im)pertinent question: “What has the brown thrasher ever done for the state?” Perhaps these examples seem blithe, but the urgency of capturing such narratives is dramatized by the number of codas informing us that the interviewee died before publication.

Preservation is important work; certainly the greatest attribute of the Foxfire series is its dedication to capturing, in the words of its current editor, “the culture, wit, and wisdom of the people.” And yet the act of preservation can be more complicated than it seems. Romanticizing the past, focusing backward at the expense of ennobling the present, is an invitation to stagnation. This has long been a problem with the way we talk about Appalachia. We have more than a century’s worth of commentary and photojournalism in which a depiction of Appalachia as a simple place unencumbered by the challenges of modernity invites the adjoining image of a dead-weight backwater holding back American progress.