You always know where home is, perhaps most acutely so when you no longer live there. It is that sense of sorrow and longing that is at the core of "The Appalachians," a three-part documentary that begins airing tonight at 10 on WETA.
Mari-Lynn Evans, the show's executive producer, remembers her grandfather being forced out of his ancestral home near Bulltown, W.Va., by an Army Corps of Engineers project. He moved into her home in Akron, Ohio, and never got over it.
Images of the Appalachia's evocative scenery, such as this West Virginia mill, enrich PBS's captivating series "The Appalachians."
(West Virginia Film Commission)
|
| | | | | | | | | | ___ Arts & Living___ News about the television industry, reviews of shows and more can be found on our Television page. See what's on TV today, tomorrow or next week with the TV Grid. | | | | | | |
|
"Urban Appalachia is now more or less modern," says Evans. "But rural Appalachia . . . is something else."
She means that in the tragic, comic and heroic senses, and the fine show she spent five years producing reflects all of the above. "The Appalachians" (with a script by the District's Phylis Geller) is a fast-moving account of the past 300 years of one of America's most mythologized, romanticized and ridiculed regions. Daniel Boone, the Hatfields and McCoys, the Trail of Tears, Antietam, the Grand Ole Opry, bluegrass, the War on Poverty, strip mining, Loretta Lynn, "The Beverly Hillbillies," and even Clarice Starling, heroine of "The Silence of the Lambs," all stem, in their glory and their tatters, from Appalachia.
The once-a-week series will come to be best known, I suspect, for its ownership of the final interview with the late Johnny Cash. His wife, June Carter Cash (who died before filming), was a member of the most famous family of Appalachian musicians. Though clearly affected by a stroke, Cash, who hailed from Arkansas, talks of the region's influence on his songs, which became a cornerstone of 20th-century American music. He closes the final episode with a duet of "Forty Shades of Green" with daughter Rosanne. It is a touching coda and, for any country music fan, not to be missed.
Produced for $2 million, the series follows the standard public television documentary format. Each episode develops chronologically, with friendly experts, scholars, artists and locals chipping in their insights and explanations. If some of the video is lacking -- as it is in the early parts of Episode 1, where too many paintings are used to illustrate the Indian era -- this is compensated for by a superb soundtrack, a mix of new and historical pieces.
For the uninitiated, Appalachia is a spinelike series of mountain ranges that stretch from New York to north Alabama. These ranges -- the Alleghenies, the Blue Ridge, the Shenandoah, the Smokies -- have historically shielded their residents from the rest of American society, creating an insular, hard-edged culture of its own.
Episode 1 starts slowly in the Indian days before moving to the influx of white settlers who would come to define the region: Scots-Irish castoffs, with smatterings of Brits, Germans, and African slaves. Lost up in the hollows, they were bound by their story songs from the Scottish and Irish highlands back home, peculiar English, religious fervor and often a devout love of whiskey -- though not always in that order, as their enthusiastic participation in the Whiskey Rebellion makes clear.
A haunting melange of the music, moodiness and violence of the era is found in the showcased ballad, "Banks of the Ohio." Everyone from Cash to Olivia Newton-John has recorded it despite its original lyrics about a man who kills the woman who declines to marry him:
I drew my knife across her throat
Into my breast she gently pressed
Please oh please don't murder me
For I'm unprepared to die, you see.
The narrator responds by throwing her in the river.
