Metro Pulse/Gamut

Comment
on this story

The Real Ralph

An Appalshop documentary tells the story of Ralph Stanley.

Herb E. Smith grew up on Ralph Stanley's music. By the time Smith was a Kentucky teenager in the 1960s, Stanley had been playing and recording bluegrass for 20 years as half of the legendary Stanley Brothers. When Carter Stanley died in 1966, Ralph soldiered on. In the ensuing decades, he has performed and recorded tirelessly, picking his banjo and singing his striking tenor harmonies for audiences around the world.

"What's amazing is I think that now he's at the top of his form," Smith says of the subject of his new film, The Ralph Stanley Story. It's a contention that few who saw Stanley at his most recent Knoxville engagement last winter would dispute. Playing with talented and often younger musicians who included his own son, the diminutive Stanley sounded livelier than anyone else on stage.

Still, he's 74 years old, and Smith thought he should document Stanley while he's still arguably in his prime.

A veteran filmmaker with Kentucky-based Appalshop, Smith first approached Stanley about a movie in 1994. The result will premiere at the Tennessee Theatre this Sunday as part of Appalshop's "Voices from Home" tour.

"Ralph has pretty much kept a sound that is really based on what he heard from his mother and father and what he grew up hearing in the mountains of southwestern Virginia," Smith says. "A lot of people don't get the music from the source, they get it second- or third-hand. And I think [Stanley] really realizes that his strength is that connection."

As bluegrass has evolved over the years to incorporate jazz (Bela Fleck), pop (Alison Krauss), and rock (the Grateful Dead and various "newgrass" players), Stanley has stayed rooted in the songs he and his brother either wrote or learned in their early days as musicians. Even in recent collaborations with latter-day fans like Vince Gill and Bob Dylan, Stanley hews to his muse and brings his guests along.

Smith's 82-minute film includes archival footage of the Stanley Brothers, interviews with friends and family, and recent concert and conversation clips with the man himself. Because of funding hold-ups (courtesy of the Newt Gingrich-led assault on the National Endowment for the Arts), the movie took longer than Smith anticipated. But he said that turned into a blessing, because it gave him time to get to know the outwardly taciturn singer.

"I didn't interview him for two years," Smith says. "At that point, he really opened up in a way that I felt great about. I think you see it in the film, you see this willingness to speak openly.

"I think Ralph is really smart," he continues. "I often see musicians as people who are primarily performers and maybe not that deep as thinkers. But he thinks hard about the kind of music he wants to perform and what his strength is."

Smith anticipates some future public television broadcasts of the film, either regional or national, and possibly a video release. But the Knoxville showing will probably be the only chance to see it on a big screen.

"Ralph is a national treasure," Smith says. "And we're just really fortunate as Americans, I think, to have him."

—J.F.M.

Appalshop's "Voices from Home" celebrates three decades of films, music, and activism

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

In Baby Boomer mythology, which is also now our prevailing national mythology, the year 1969 signals an end: the year that started with Woodstock and finished with Altamont, the year Neil Armstrong went to the moon and Richard Nixon took office, the last hurrah (or maybe last gasp) of what we now call "the '60s."

It's a convenient conceit, and maybe a fair one. But there was a lot going on in those closing months of the decade, and not all of it vanished in a patchouli haze. In Knoxville that year, two groups started that would grow into essential features of the city's cultural landscape: Jubilee Community Arts and Carpetbag Theatre. Meanwhile, across the Cumberland Mountains in a small coal-mining town called Whitesburg, Kentucky, another organization began with a small federal grant and a general mission to bring media to the people of Central Appalachia. It called itself Appalshop.

Beginning this weekend and continuing through the following week, Appalshop—which has evolved into an acclaimed multi-media outfit including film production, theater, a music label, and a radio station—will come to Knoxville to celebrate its 30th anniversary. And it will have assistance from its longtime partners in Carpetbag and Jubilee.

"We're fellow travelers, you might say," says Brent Cantrell, Jubilee's executive director, noting that Jubilee and Appalshop have shared programming and staff members over the years. Linda Parris-Bailey, executive and artistic director of Carpetbag Theatre, says, "I think [our] missions are absolutely parallel. When we think about the empowerment of people in the region and the nation, we have similar appeals to the way people tell their own stories and seek out their own strategies in the communities."

If that sounds more noble than fun, don't worry: Appalshop's events, under the banner of "Voices from Home," include lively music, emotionally charged theater, provocative films, and hands-on media workshops. "Our idea of the tour is that we're not just taking Appalshop work out and showing it in other places," says Maxine Kenny, an Appalshop veteran who's in charge of the Voices program. "We are also participating with people in those areas. The idea was, if we came and spent two weeks here with our resources, how could we help [local organizations] with their own work?"

Appalshop, a non-profit mini-empire dedicated to traditional culture and social justice, is an unlikely entity in an unlikely place. Whitesburg is a small town with just a few curving streets that wind past a small fire hall, a handful of still-active storefronts on the main drag, and a compact courthouse and public office building. With a population of under 2,000, it's still the largest community in tiny Letcher County and therefore the county seat. Like most mining towns in Eastern Kentucky, it feels carved out of the surrounding mountains, which rear up on every side. Unless you're a native, the encircling hills can induce a sense of claustrophobia, a longing for horizons beyond the immediate peaks.

Appalshop sits just on the edge of town, in a converted mill building perched along a mountain river. The first thing that strikes you on entering is the diversity of ages, genders, and general appearances of the people inside. Women and men ranging from their 20s to their 70s cluster in offices and lobbies and meeting rooms, dressed in khakis and button-downs or shorts and T-shirts, some young with cropped hair, others with long graying locks. (There are no suits and ties in evidence.) Tables and bulletin boards are covered with pamphlets and fliers touting everything from craft fairs to concerts to lectures on labor rights and environmental crises.

Occupying one of the offices is Herb E. Smith, an Appalshop filmmaker. He was a teenager in Whitesburg in the late 1960s when he heard there was a new program in town where young Kentuckians could learn to make movies.

"Dad worked in the mines, and I was in high school at the time," he says. "I came down and really just started by how to use the equipment, and next thing I knew I was making films."

Smith became part of the founding corps of Appalshop, which began with a grant from a long-dead outfit called the Community Film Workshop Council. It was a federally funded effort started under Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty." The idea was to train people in disadvantaged communities—inner cities and rural areas—both to document their own experiences and to work in the film industry. The program didn't last long; even as Appalshop was getting going, the Nixon administration was cutting funding for Johnson's "Great Society" initiatives.

But it was enough to plant the idea in Whitesburg. From there, a group of staff members and volunteers labored to build Appalshop into an independent organization. By the fall of 1971, the group had achieved a balance of funding that it maintains to this day, a mixture of individual donations, federal and state grants, and private foundation money. Its mission was clear from the beginning, although it has taken various forms over the years.

"In the deepest sense, the idea has remained the same, and that is for people in this part of the country to show the world as they see it," Smith says. "It's really about a regional culture that has often been either misrepresented by the mainstream media or taken and warped into something that's almost separate from its source. What we aim to do is strengthen traditions, help people to hold onto the things in these mountains that they value, and at the same time wrestle with the changes that are all around us."

That two-pronged approach means Appalshop has been equally active in documenting traditional Appalachian life and fighting for changes in economic, environmental, and education policies in the region. The organization now has about 35 full-time staff members and an annual budget of $2.5 million. Besides its film and video division, which has produced 86 documentaries on everything from girls' basketball in Kentucky to the impact of hillbilly stereotypes, it includes the Roadside Theater, the Appalachian Media Institute for training young people in video and radio production, the traditional music label June Appal Recordings, and the community radio station WMMT, which broadcasts a remarkable mix of commentary and music (from bluegrass to jazz to hip-hop) throughout Central Appalachia. (For more information on all of the above, you can visit the website at www.appalshop.org.)

The "Voices" tour is taking portions of Appalshop's work to six widely spaced stops: Knoxville, San Antonio, Anchorage, the Bronx, Berkeley, and Cincinnati. The cities were chosen for geographic and cultural variety, and also because they're all home to groups Appalshop has worked with in the past. Knoxville was an obvious first stop, Smith says, because "for us, Knoxville is the big city to some degree. It's in the mountains, but it's in the valley too. It's an industrial city surrounded by mountains. Over the years, we've had a lot of connections with Knoxville."

Those are reflected most obviously in a collaboration with Carpetbag Theatre, an acclaimed African-American troupe that makes its home here but performs internationally. At 11 a.m. next Thursday, Appalshop will screen its film Evelyn Williams at Knoxville College. The movie is a documentary by Anne Lewis about an African-American woman fighting to save her family's Kentucky land from oil and gas companies. That evening, Carpetbag will perform an excerpt of its play Nothin' Nice, which grapples with similar themes of environmental racism and pollution. Parris-Bailey wrote the piece, which is about a boy living in an urban neighborhood whose mother is dying of cancer. Both the morning and evening events will include audience discussions afterward.

"We thought it was important to have the dialogue," Parris-Bailey says. "We want to be able to engage people."

Among other highlights of the week will be:

* A premiere screening on Sunday, Nov. 11, of Smith's new bluegrass documentary, The Ralph Stanley Story (see sidebar).

* A screening on Wednesday, Nov. 15, of Stranger With a Camera, a documentary that debuted at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Appalshop filmmaker Elizabeth Barret (who also happens to be Smith's wife), it recounts the murder of a Canadian documentarian in the late '60s by a Kentucky man. The Kentuckian, Hobart Ison, owned several run-down houses and was angry the filmmaker was interviewing some of his renters. Barret's film probes the boundaries of cultural reporting and asks, as she puts it, "Can filmmakers show poverty without shaming the people we portray?"

* A benefit concert by folk singer John McCutcheon for Appalshop, Carpetbag, and Jubilee, at Laurel Theatre.

* And assorted community media events, culminating in a closing celebration on Sunday, Nov. 19 at the Senor Taco restaurant on North Broadway.

All events are open to the public and, except for the Ralph Stanley film and the benefit concert, free of charge. Smith notes that the tour, like many Appalshop efforts, has support from the National Endowdment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts—agencies that have suffered funding cuts in recent years. The shrinking federal grants have forced a continual quest for new money from regional donors and national foundations.

"All of those sources are pretty competitive," Smith says. "We have to write the grants every year and go out there and raise the money to keep it going."

Nevertheless, Appalshop in its fourth decade seems as healthy and energetic as it's ever been—a testament, Smith believes, to the determination and vision of its mostly native talent. Now an institution in its own right, he says the organization has learned how to work within its communities and prod them at the same time.

"In the earliest days, we kind of relished the notion that we were somehow against the way things are happening here," he says. "Part of it was just being 17, 18 years old. But it was a time of tremendous change. I like to think Appalshop still has an edge to it. But we realized we can do something concrete. It's not just about throwing rocks at those people who we perceived as creating problems, but it's also about forming alliances with people who we might disagree with on other issues."

Looking back at the upheaval that gave birth to so many ideas, Parris-Bailey sums up the ongoing mission of the Class of '69: "That kind of stimulus is just not here anymore. We are kind of the bearers of that legacy. It makes you not take the work lightly. You have the weight of 31 years."