'The Appalachians' Hits Down-Home

Images of the Appalachia's evocative scenery, such as this West Virginia mill, enrich PBS's captivating series "The Appalachians." (West Virginia Film Commission)

Clearly, the mountains could get to you. And so can this song, with its haunting melody and disturbing beauty. That's a good definition of art.

Meanwhile, as Episode 2 demonstrates, isolation doesn't always bring peace, or even peace of mind. A president from Appalachia, Andrew Jackson, ordered the forced march of the entire Cherokee tribe to Oklahoma in 1838, to clear out more land for whites. Perhaps a quarter of the estimated 20,000 deported Cherokee died en route.

"I wish I could forget it all," a former Tennessee infantryman named John Burnett wrote in a letter to his children more than half a century later. "But the picture of 645 wagons lumbering over the frozen ground with their cargo of suffering humanity still lingers in my memory."

That perhaps was also the last time Appalachian people had the wherewithal to push anybody around. They were soon themselves exploited for their coal and timber. Companies bought up rights to the land, forced owners to move, then left them with little opportunity but to work in the mines and buy overpriced goods at the company stores.

This produced mind-numbing poverty and the region's dominant image: black-lunged men crawling out of holes in the ground to stagger home to a lightless shack in the mountains. The people came to be derided as "hillbillies" -- uneducated, impoverished, violent people best left alone, or so the stereotype went.

But they had always clung to their music, which forms the basis of the final episode. If you're mostly interested in the music, this is the one to watch. The show is at its best explaining the explosion in popularity of the region's songs through the radio broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry.

Near the end of the last installment, the late author John O'Brien, one of the show's more entertaining interview subjects, tries to explain the hold Appalachia casts over its children, even those who have fled the region. He could always tell when he was back:

"There would be one moment when we would look out and there would be an overview of the hills, especially at dusk as they were turning blue and there was a mist rising out of some of the valleys, and a little white farmhouse tucked . . . between shouldering hills. And that was it, you know, our hearts would leap."

He said that when he knew he was terminally ill with cancer.

There may be more modern and fancy things in American life, but few more plaintive and stirring -- the lights of home in the coming darkness.

The Appalachians (one hour) airs at 10 on Channel 26, and continues at the same time the next two Mondays. For more information on the soundtrack or the companion book, see www.wnpt.net/appalachiansand www.sierraclub.org/appalachia.