Voices From The Mountains

In the shifting sands of today’s uncertain world, where traditional paradigms are fragmenting and everything seems in a state of flux, the biblical mountains endure as unshakable and steadfast. In their caves and canyons linger ancient voices that can startle us into new insights and awaken in us new ways of seeing the world and ourselves. In this book we go on a quest to locate the ancient voices of those who actually lived in these mountains, who knew both the physical contours and spiritual secrets of the summits and who long pondered their mysteries. We will rediscover texts and fragments that have been long forgotten in the West. The pandemic has filled the world with uncertainty and fear. We will discover wisdom and insights that are strikingly relevant to this unfolding world crisis and that speak with an uncanny directness to our situation. But the wisdom here is timeless and enduring, and readers will benefit from these ancient voices in all generations and in all sorts of circumstances. This book is not so much an anthology of forgotten voices as a sourcebook of spirituality and a guidebook for the spiritual adventure.

A rich mosaic of photographs, words, and songs, Voices from the Mountains tells the turbulent story of the Appalachian South in the twentieth century. Focusing on the abuses of the coal industry and the grassroots struggle against mine owners that began in the 1960s, Guy and Candie Carawan have gathered quotations from a variety of sources; words and music to more than fifty ballads and songs, laments and satires, hymns and protests; and more than one hundred and fifty photographs of longtime Appalachian residents, their homes, their countryside, the mines they work in, and the labor battles they have fought. The "voices" that speak out in these pages range from the mountain people themselves to such well-known artists as Jean Ritchie, Hazel Dickens, Harriet Simpson Arnow, and Wendell Berry. Together they tell of the damage wrought by strip mining and the empty promises of land reclamation; the search for work and a new life in the North; the welfare rights, labor, antipoverty, and black lung movements; early days in the mines; disasters and negligence in the coal industry; and protest and change in the coal fields. Dignity and despair, poverty and perseverance, tradition and change--Voices from the Mountains eloquently conveys the complex panorama of modern Appalachian life.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

For two years, a mysterious and increasingly violent criminal terrorized the countryside near Shade Gap, Pennsylvania. One warm spring afternoon in 1966, he committed his penultimate outrage: he kidnapped a girl. Taken from her family at gunpoint, Peggy Ann Bradnick was dragged into the impenetrable forests of the Appalachian Mountains. Miraculously, the victim withstood not only the abduction, but the fame that followed it. Fifty years later, the survivor of that weeklong ordeal at the hands of a deranged kidnapper tells her own story, as it has never been told before: not only of the crime that changed her life, but the lifetime that has followed.