“There are two words that a southwest Virginian just cannot say,” Bill Smith explains as he sips a whiskey in Good Times, one of the more recent places to open in the town of Big Stone Gap. He pauses for effect.
“‘Yes.’ And ‘No’.”
Because they don’t want to be impolite?
“Well. That’s part of it. They also don’t want to hang their asses. You can hear it in the jokes. Someone can say something really cutting. And then they’ll say, ‘Awh, I was just joking with ya.’ I came from a place where if you don’t answer a question straight, you get: what’s the matter, can’t you make up your mind?”
Smith moved from Montana to Big Stone Gap (population 5,114), one of Virginia’s many recovering coal towns, 30 years ago. He brought with him a sense of adventure inherited from his mother, who was a big-band singer from Chicago and, later, a renowned drama schoolteacher in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
Smith is one of those people who move in no hurry and yet seem to have packed a thousand lives into seven decades. He was a firefighter in California, plus a musician, plus an actor. In Virginia, he worked manual jobs, then as a sports reporter covering the Big Stone Gap school football team during a few feverish all-state seasons. He also curated the acclaimed Crooked Road festival.
On the afternoon we meet he has just finished-up substitute teaching at the local high school. He’d never heard of Wise County, much less Big Stone Gap, before the 1990s. But one night he caught a performance by Roadside Theater, an Appalachian touring group, and he met Nancy Countiss.
“That was it,” he chuckles. “I came out here in 1994. Not on a whim. But I fell in love. The last show I did was in Montana, and 10 days later I was learning how to make hydraulic hoses here for minimum wage.”
By “out here” he means the pioneer trail in reverse: crossing the fabled Cumberland Gap, the mountain pass that intersects the Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia state lines, and into the triangular wedge of counties in southwest Virginia. He arrived just as the coal companies had begun their exodus, disrupting the deeply established patterns of life throughout Appalachia, the 13-state mountainous region of the United States that has acquired a reputation that is in some ways distinct from and deeper than the country itself.
Bill Smith doesn’t yet consider himself local, “although it helps that my wife’s family’s been here 300 years”. He’s a natural raconteur and has a fizzing mind with which he bounces through topics and centuries at will. Over the course of an afternoon, he tells me that here, the big open-plan Good Times restaurant, was the original location for the town newspaper the “Post”, where he began working in 1996 “just as Westmoreland coal was leaving and things were tense”.
He talks about the difference between formal schooling and inherited knowledge. “Education was never a priority. Because you could go into the mines and make more than the teacher. People have a tendency to look down on miners. But it is highly technical and dangerous and always has been.”
That takes him on the rich seam of storytelling running through the Pow [Powell] Valley, and the inherited music tradition. He talks about the Bristol museum, about an hour away, where Ralph Peer all but created the US country music tradition through a series of recordings he made in the summer of 1927.
“And you can’t throw a dead cat around here without hitting a musician. Some of the best old-time and bluegrass music in the country is within 100 miles of here. Last Saturday there were three different bands in town. But before the pandemic there weren’t really any bars here to speak of. For years, it used to be the front porch.”
He explains how the consequences of the pandemic are still taking a toll. “Too many kids came out of Covid damaged. They were feral. This is our first proper year back in school. The pandemic in this area – we had almost 1/10th of our population die. I lost 14 friends. I think it was over 1,000 people in Wise County.”
Something jigs a memory of an inherited story: his wife’s great-great grandfather, eight years old and walking for days with his family on the move to Wise County. “He was carrying the family pewter. And a chair. Well, seems he got real tired of hanging on to the pewter and he chucked it. Piece by piece. Into the woods. But we have that chair still.” Then he says, out of the blue, “Daniel Boone walked the ground right about my house,” as if the famed pioneer had passed by just last week.
The overarching point is that while Smith still considers himself “an oddity” to the true locals in town and in this part of Appalachia, the richness and singularity of the region has him spellbound.
“It’s wild,” he says. “And it’s conservative. And it has cultural depth.”
It is, we agree, a long way from Washington, longer than its 430 miles suggest. You can catch a little of Virginia’s hauteur in its nickname, “Old Dominion”.
Arlington House, perched above the cemetery, looms over Washington, DC, as the former home of the Confederate general Robert E Lee. If you drive the I-80 and swing a right past Senator Tim Kaine’s constituency office in Abingdon, after which the state turns truly mountainous and bewitching, you will finally end up in Lee County, named after the famed general’s father. The cross-state drive takes about seven hours, allowing stops for petrol and Dunkin’ Donuts.
In the 2024 presidential election, Wise County returned Donald Trump with an 81 per cent vote. Neighbouring Lee County voted Trump by 85 per cent. These are thumping returns in counties that can make for grim reading in the statistical data: 27 per cent of people live below the poverty line in Lee County. An unofficial stat: in an area of gorgeous natural beauty, Lee County shows no hotels on the usual listing sites.
It has, more recently acquired a literary significance as the setting for Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s phenomenally successful, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that transposes the blueprint for David Copperfield on to a live-wire teenager in southwest Virginia during the opioid epidemic that ravaged this part of the state.
Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky and lives in Virginia. She has railed, wonderfully, against the authenticity of vice-president JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy which, she said, was dismissed by neighbours for “the hollowness, the fact that he isn’t really one of us”. In the same 2024 Guardian interview, she said she has, despite the accolades, “dealt with this condescension, this anti-hillbilly bigotry for a lot of my life”.
Kingsolver is a fearsome defender against all the national prejudices Appalachia has faced down. More impressively, she has put her money where her mouth is. January marked the opening of the Higher Ground recovery centre in the town of Pennington Gap. It’s a bungalow dwelling in the heart of the town that has been converted to a refuge for women recovering from addiction. The shelter is funded by Kingsolver, with absolutely no fanfare.
Over lunch in the McDonald’s down the street, Elizbeth Brooks, who grew up in Lee County and runs the centre, tells me she understands exactly what Kingsolver means by the casual prejudice thrown at Appalachians.
“I feel like it varies. I mean there is a stigma to our area. And we are – I don’t know, most people just see those of us who live in Appalachia as hicks and hillbillies and all that. And they do. And … I agree with Barbara. On the TV shows and everything it’s all they focus on. They don’t focus on the beautiful areas up here. They don’t spend time here.
“My own family, when we travel, if you go to a bigger area, people can be rude and disrespectful. Here we are friendly. My dad will wave at every single car. The finger raised from the wheel. Even the counties surrounding Lee County will kind of make jokes … ‘Oh they’re from Lee County’. Some people take offence. And especially with schools and stuff too. There’s … a snobbery.”
About eight years ago, one of the worst moments of Brooks’s life catapulted her into an unlikely transformation. She was eight months pregnant with her first child when she says she was arrested and, because of previous charges, placed on a Court Recovery programme. She had, in her teens, graduated from alcohol and marijuana to opioids and methamphetamines, dropping out of Wise college and falling into a pattern of addiction.
“When you are in addiction there is a lot of isolation,” she says. “You shut everybody out.”
A 2019 report by the Washington Post included data analysis recording that, between 2006-2012, 34.9 million opioids, or 120 pills per resident, were shipped into Wise County alone. Brooks regards her eldest child Jayden as “my miracle baby”. She has been sober since July 7th, 2018, and was working as an addiction counsellor when she was asked to run the new centre. She speaks with Kingsolver regularly, usually on Zoom. “She’s been wonderful. I don’t know how she does it because she’s a very busy woman.”
There are six women in the residence now.
“I do their medications. It’s kind of about building up their stability and accountability and getting them stable in the real world. A couple of my girls … they are, I wouldn’t say hot-headed, but they are little firecrackers. And their personalities clash a little. So, it is kind of learning how to be emotionally stable as well. I tell them: there is more to recovery than just being sober. You need to work on yourself, get your mental health right, get your job and just be accountable for yourself.”
One of the very first residents, Crystal, who is working at the counter in McDonald’s, talks about the transformative effect the home has had on her life. Brooks likes that prospective residents be sober for about five or six weeks before taking a place there and returning to employment is part of the deal.
But it can be difficult finding a job in Lee County. The Appalachian Regional Commission reports that in Lee between 2018-2022, 26 per cent of people lived in poverty and the average household income was $41,000 (it is $75,000 nationally). Brooks works nine to five. Jayden is autistic. She is due to give birth to her third child this summer. Evenings are busy: weekends a chance to come up for air.
“I tell my girls too – I’m no different from they are or any better because in my recovery, at any point, it’s always a battle for me, too, just like it is for them. I’ve learned a lot about my triggers and staying away from them situations I don’t need and that’s what keeps me sober. Because I’m not saying I still couldn’t have a bad day and go down the wrong path.
We were like a runaway train ... I felt like we didn’t have any kind of leadership whatsoever
— Hank Fannon
“And before my fiance now - a thousand people would tell you I would never be engaged to a police officer in my life. And I would never have been with somebody who treated me with the most respect, that I respect myself with. It’s very different now, and I am very grateful.”
She and her fiance have held back on their wedding date because of the growing uncertainty over Medicaid changes; her boy is dependent on the treatment he receives through the programme. She is closely tracking the political conversation on autism taking place in the capital. In April, US health secretary Robert F Kennedy pledged “a massive testing and research effort” to determine the cause of autism. Trump has appeared to suggest that vaccines could be to blame for autism rates, although decades of research have concluded there is no link between the two.
“There aren’t many options for my son around here. So that would affect him. I feel like that would have made a really big impact on the election if people knew that. Just because it is going to hurt everyone. And I don’t really see the helping part of it. I don’t understand how that helps because unless you have a child with autism you don’t really – there is nothing that causes it. And I think they could have worded it a lot better.”
Still, this is steadfast Trump country. And the ARC reports slowly climbing figures of median income levels and employment throughout the region. There is no sign of any real crisis of faith in Trump Republicanism here.
On the way back from Big Stone Gap, I find Hank Fannon at the telephone in the office of the immaculately tidy tyre business he owns. Like seemingly everyone in this part of the country, Fannon’s voice is rich and melodic. A television in the corner of the office is showing Fox News on silent and images of Trump’s recent visit to the Middle East.
The Fannons are in both the tyre and real estate business.
“It’s a little tighter-fisted than it was,” he says. “But Trump … he’s the most patriotic thing that has come through in a long time. That shooting, wherever it was ... that put him in the White House. And the tariff thing is impacting, yeah. I sell some American-made stuff. All the China-built stuff. It’s probably raised prices, $20, $30 a tyre. And I can’t eat nothin.
“People are subject to doing impulse spending with this kind of stuff. If you need a tyre, it’s just like going to the doctor: hurt’s bad; ‘I gotta get something done now.’ But we were like a runaway train the other way. I felt like we didn’t have any kind of leadership whatsoever. I knew when Trump came back into play it would tighten up a little – for a while.”
But property prices, always modest, are beginning to rise. Appalachia is not immune to the property escalation heist that has gripped America. People are noticing the extraordinary value to be had in this part of the country – and the stunning landscape. We talk for a while about the economic realities of the region. Fannon sighs before answering.
“This is a depressed community, first off. There is a lot of poverty here. So, indirectly I am living off fixed-income people. So … I don’t know. It bothers me some. We sell real estate in this region and it has been cheap real estate. But right now ... you can put a sign in the yard. A lady died three weeks ago and her daughter and I went to school together. And it sold in two days.”
It also sold for well above the asking price. Up in Big Stone Gap, Joey O’Quinn, who works part-time in the tourism centre, is talking to a friend of his, Les Bailey. There’s a bottle of gift whiskey on the counter and they joke about never opening a second bottle before noon. Bailey is rushing off to take their mutual friend, Larry Mullins, to the doctor. They all play in a band called the Hillbilly Hippies.
Tourism is beginning to make an impression. Big Stone Gap is slowly opening itself up to the idea that it can be an attraction to outsiders, with new restaurants and cafes alongside the staunch jeweller’s and legal firms on the main street. It has the natural splendour and the unrivalled music heritage and – the scarcest of commodities – authenticity.
The local cafes and restaurants are friendly and without affectation of any sort. O’Quinn, who worked as a regulator with mining companies, believes the future for this part of Virginia lies in tourism, flipping the “hillbilly” stigma after centuries.
“We have to be sensitive to that balance. This has been an impoverished region, yes, since the 1800s. But there are so many good things in terms of music and the mountains and all that culture.”
Close to the tight triangle of land where the three state lines of Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky intersect, people driving the US-58 often do a double take as they pass by Junior Whitt’s place. The striking thing about these counties is the absence of Trump banners or mementoes. But Whitt’s place is a shrine to Maga-ism.
He is sitting on a sun chair enjoying a smoke when I stop to ask him what inspired all of this. We find ourselves looking at the Confederate flags he has hanging. He says he hangs them because they are part of the history of the state, of the region. Often, strangers stop and ask to take photographs and Whitt will engage them in conversation.
“Well, from what I’m hearing all the time: they are for Trump,” he says in a gentle voice.
“They are not for the other side. I don’t go for the transgender stuff and all this critical race theory stuff. I don’t go for this stuff and a lot of other people don’t go for it. That’s why I’m against the Democrats. I don’t vote for all that. And a lot of other people say, well, I don’t vote for that either. I say, well, it’s the same damn package. If you vote for ’em you, vote for it. They say, ‘I never thought about it that way; you’re right’. Yeah, I’m right.
“This house across the road ... they are big Democrats. We get along and everything. I hear it every day. People from out of state come through, see this, stop and walk around. And they’re for Trump too. If the Democrats got back in, they would have destroyed us.”
We chat for a while more. When there are no cars passing, it is incredibly serene here. Whitt waves an arm against the blue sky in the vague direction of his childhood home, on a farm near the Pow river. His parents were Democrats. He says his father would turn in his grave if he could see the party now. He sounds suddenly frustrated and tired by the state of American politics.
“See, back then you had some good Democrats. They sat down and talked with people.”
